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Posts Tagged ‘West End Gallery’

The Scarecrow

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

Not a Crow in Sight– At West End Gallery

THE SCARECROW

Once I said to a scarecrow, “You must be tired of standing in this lonely field.”

And he said, “The joy of scaring is a deep and lasting one, and I never tire of it.”

Said I, after a minute of thought, “It is true; for I too have known that joy.”

Said he, “Only those who are stuffed with straw can know it.”

Then I left him, not knowing whether he had complimented or belittled me.

A year passed, during which the scarecrow turned philosopher.

And when I passed by him again I saw two crows building a nest under his hat.

–Kahlil Gibran, The Madman, His Parables and Poems (1918)

Looks like the theme for today is the scarecrow even though I have already spent too much time attempting to write something altogether different.  The other and now discarded subject was just not coming together in any kind of cohesive way. But in a roundabout way it did lead me to the short parable above from Kahlil Gibran.

The answer from the scarecrow– “The joy of scaring is a deep and lasting one, and I never tire of it.” — struck my fancy.

I just stopped for a few moments after writing that to ponder what a strange phrase struck my fancy is. There may be a blog post in that phrase. Or not, which is probably for the better. Whatever strikes my fancy.

But the idea of that there can be joy in scaring is intriguing. I am not sure I ever felt scaring people was part of who or what I am. But taking joy in scaring those who richly deserve it might be within me. It probably should be within all of us just so that we keep the deserving aware of our presence and the power we possess over them.

That last sentence probably seems like pretty cryptic. Well, it probably is. Scarecrows are seldom what they seem so take it any way you wish.

Here’s a song, Scarecrow, from Beck just to round out today’s triad. Got to run– two crows are pecking around my hat…

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“The Interpenetration of Realities”

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on April 10, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Sea of the Six Moons– At West End Gallery

What we, thanks to Jung, call “synchronicity” (coincidence on steroids), Buddhists have long known as “the interpenetration of realities.” Whether it’s a natural law of sorts or simply evidence of mathematical inevitability (an infinite number of monkeys locked up with an infinite number of typewriters eventually producing Hamlet, not to mention Tarzan of the Apes), it seems to be as real as it is eerie.

-Tom Robbins, The Syntax of Sorcery (2012)

I came across the passage from author Tom Robbins, who died in February at the age of 92, while doing some research. One phrase from it, “the interpenetration of realities,” really jumped out at me. I am not ready to tell you what I was researching or why the phrase struck me as it did. That will be forthcoming and self-evident in the coming weeks.

But I will say that, for some reason, it reminded me of a favorite song, That’s the Way the World Goes Round, from the late John Prine. I think it has something to do with the constancy of the inevitabilities of life– the sun coming up and the sun going down, the tide coming in and the tide going out, the joy and sorrow that comes with living and dying, and so on. They all come to us at some point while this old world just keeps turning round.

That doesn’t really answer anything about the interpenetration of realities, does it? All I’ll say is that it made me wonder if the rhythms of our life cycles are modulated by other dimensions or worlds of reality that we may never know. Do they serve as a sort of unseen natural force, much like gravity, that keeps on track?

I don’t know. But rereading that just now makes me wonder if there was a little something extra in my coffee this morning.

I think I’ll just leave it there for now and share the song with the promise that I will sometime soon explain how the interpenetration of realities comes into play. Well, that is if I don’t forget…

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Painting Demo/ Solo Show/West End Gallery

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on April 8, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Work in Progress 2025

If you’re a painter, you are not alone. There’s no way to be alone. You think and you care and you’re with all the people who care. You think you care and you’re with all the people who care, including the young people who don’t know they do yet. Tomlin in his late paintings knew this, Jackson always knew it: that if you meant it enough when you did it, it will mean that much.

–Franz Kline, Evergreen Review interview, 1958

Just taking a moment to announce the dates for two upcoming events at the West End Gallery in Corning.

The first is for my annual solo exhibit at the gallery. I have normally had my solo show at the West End Gallery in July. This created a short turnaround between my annual June show at the Principle Gallery and the July show at the West End which was very stressful. It has become more and more difficult as I have aged and my processes evolve. By that, I mean it simply takes longer to complete each painting. As a result, we have moved this year’s West End Gallery show– my 24th solo effort there— to the autumn.  The 2025 exhibit will open on Friday, October 17 and run until November 13. The date for the accompanying Gallery Talk will be announced later, closer to the show opening.

The second announced date is much sooner and for something I seldom do for a variety of reasons. However, after being asked for a number of years, I will be doing a painting demonstration at the West End Gallery in a little over two weeks, on Saturday, April 26. My demo begins at 10 AM and runs to about 12 noon or thereabouts.

This event is being held in conjunction with the Arts in Bloom Art Trail of Chemung and Steuben County which involves open tours of artists’ studios and events such as this in the area’s art galleries. Painter extraordinaire Trish Coonrod will also be giving a demonstration at the same time. We will both be in the Upstairs Gallery so if you’re interested it serves up a nice two-fer. A chance to witness two starkly different processes.

As I said, I seldom do these demos. However, I felt that it was important, with what looks to be a challenging year for the artists and galleries, to do all I could do to support the gallery that has been my home for 30 years now.

It’s definitely out of my comfort zone and I am more than a little self-conscious about painting in front of people. I think it’s partly because, being self-taught, I don’t necessarily paint in a traditional manner. It’s not always flashy and fast. I also worry that someone will be there only when the painting is in one of the flat and unflattering stages that almost all my paintings go through.

But despite my apprehensions, I am certain it will come off well. Things usually do okay when I am this nervous.

I know it’s early in the day, but if you’re interested, please stop in at the West End Gallery on Saturday, April 26 to watch and chat for a bit. It might be fun. No kibitzing though!

Here’s a time-lapse video from 2011 that shows the stages some of my work goes through on the way to being a painting.

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Stand Alone

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on April 2, 2025| Leave a Comment »

The Center Found– At the West End Gallery

The tumult of sorrow, of anger, of bitterness, of despair, was drifting farther and farther away. Even the terror, which was worse than any tumult, had vanished. In that instant of renunciation she had reached some spiritual haven. What she had found, she understood presently, was the knowledge that there is no support so strong as the strength that enables one to stand alone.

–Ellen Glasgow, The Difference (1923)

There really is something cleansing and ultimately clarifying in taking a stand or taking a path that diverges from the crowd. It sharpens your vision and centers you, washing away those depleting feelings– the tumult to which Glasgow referred above–that define and bind you to a herd.

Just reading that short paragraph, I am inclined to stop right here. What more need I say?

I will add that I really didn’t know the name Ellen Glasgow before I came across this passage. Glasgow, who was born and lived her entire life, from 1873 to 1945, in Richmond Virginia, is another of those folks who were celebrated in their time but whose work never quite reached the status of being iconic enough to span generations. I did know the title of her most famous novel, In This Our Time, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1942 but only from the fact that it was also made into a Bette Davis film, one I have never actually seen.

But reading other passages and quotes from her, as well as reading several pages of the short story from which the passage at the top was taken, I am impressed by the depth of her observations. I certainly agree with her words on the enabling power that comes in standing alone.

Here’s a song from folk singer/songwriter Buffy Saint-Marie that emphasizes this point. It is the title track from her 1964 debut album, It’s My Way, that in 2016 was added to the National Recording Registry. Each year the Library of Congress selects 25 recordings that they deem to be “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” It’s a richly deserving album with many significant tracks but for today we’ll focus on this one. It’s good stuff…

A late addition: Special kudos to Sen. Corey Booker for having the strength to stand alone. His record-breaking filibuster may seem a symbolic gesture in the moment but may inspire greater action for the future. But only if others have the strength to stand alone…

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Deepen the Present

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on March 26, 2025| Leave a Comment »

The Natural— At West End Gallery

Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it.

–Thomas Merton, The Ascent to Truth

I had something in mind yesterday that I wanted to write this morning. It was a sort of vent. I won’t even mention the subject of this proposed diatribe but there is enough horrific crap floating around that won’t have to strain your imagination if you guess.

But when I finally plopped in front of my laptop, I had lost the desire to vent. It wasn’t a moment of exhaustion or dejection. I just wanted to sit in peace for a little bit this morning. Wanted to simply take in the quiet of the darkness around me.

Wanted to deepen the present, to steal a phrase from the Thomas Merton quote above. As he implied, you can’t hope or wait for solitude to arrive. It’s here in the present, always near and waiting to embrace you if only you can slow your mind enough to detect it.

That’s seems simplistic and much easier said than done. After all, it’s a hard task to slow the mind given the speed and anxiety of life today. There’s even a little guilt in doing so, especially for a compassionate and caring person. It might feel selfish for some to feel peaceful solitude while others suffer.

But solitude often brings clarity. And clarity of thought often brings decisive action. and that is what is needed in this world right now.

So, for this morning I am guiltlessly seeking the clarity that comes in solitude. I know it’s in here somewhere.

Here’s Across the Universe from the Beatles. It seems right for the moment, with its refrain of Jai Guru Deva Om which literally translates from the Sanskrit as glory to the shining remover of darkness. And looking out my window just now, I see the tall trees as dark bony silhouettes against the emerging light…

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Unlock the Secret?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on March 25, 2025| Leave a Comment »

The Burning Secret– At the West End Gallery

As I thought of these things, I drew aside the curtains and looked out into the darkness, and it seemed to my troubled fancy that all those little points of light filling the sky were the furnaces of innumerable divine alchemists, who labour continually, turning lead into gold, weariness into ecstasy, bodies into souls, the darkness into God; and at their perfect labour my mortality grew heavy, and I cried out, as so many dreamers and men of letters in our age have cried, for the birth of that elaborate spiritual beauty which could alone uplift souls weighted with so many dreams.

—William Butler Yeats, Rosa Alchemica

In this passage from the beginning of Rosa Alchemica, Yeats describes the driving force behind his search for that driving force of alchemy that has not only the purported ability to transform lead into gold but can also in the same manner transform and elevate the human spirit above that of the ordinary and mortal. A search for the essence of the spirit. The alchemy within ourselves.

Though humans have searched diligently for such a thing since ancient times, I don’t know that such an ability truly exists. But as Yeats’ words indicate, one long look into the night sky makes it easy to see why one would want to believe that such a thing is possible.

With the sky filled with a universe of wonder and the promise from distant stars and worlds, why wouldn’t we think we had the ability to transform and elevate ourselves and our lives? Or our world?

Maybe that’s the driving force behind the creative arts, an attempt at some crude alchemical transformation of the ordinary into something more, something greatly enriched with the essence of the human spirit.

Maybe. I look out the window at the morning light beginning to filter through the trees and think to myself: Why not?

It’s time to get to work on my own small attempts to achieve an alchemy of some sort. Perhaps today is the day that unlocks the secret?

Who knows? Why not?

This morning, I am sharing a video of an acoustic instrumental cover of I’d Love to Change the World, originally from Alvin Lee and Ten Years After. This is from a musician, Johnny Thompson, busking with his guitar on the street in Costa Rica. His YouTube channel has covers as well as his own originals. Though there are a few spots of wind noise, I like this performance very much.

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Morning Uncertainty

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on March 24, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Dawn’s Return–At West End Gallery

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one.

–-Voltaire, letter to Frederick II of Prussia in 1767

It’s one of those mornings. I am filled with uncertainty and the idea of focusing on writing something seems like an unbearable burden. I would rather get to a painting I am working on that will be included in my annual June solo exhibit at the Principle Gallery. That’s where the uncertainty sets in.

I am in the midst of a group of new work that is really hitting the mark for me on all levels. Oddly enough, that’s where the problem begins. My strong positive reactions are triggering equally strong feelings of doubt. It sounds crazy, I know, but the idea of certainty– my own or others– almost always raises my anxiety levels, especially when it comes to my work. 

Trying to balance these two polar opposites– doubt and certainty–results in times when one prevails. This morning, doubt wins the day. After I begin to work, certainty will make a mighty comeback. And after my painting day is done, the two will wrestle until I drift off to dreamland. 

All in all, it’s often an uncomfortable existence bouncing between the unpleasant and the absurd conditions, as Voltaire called them. 

I sometimes wish for absolute certainty. It seems like it would be satisfying to believe that your every word, action, opinion, and belief were absolutely correct. But we’ve seen where the extreme nature of that kind of certainty has taken us. I sometimes think the great divide between people is one of those who sometimes feel doubt and those who always feel absolute certainty.

Well, for someone who didn’t want to write this morning, I seem to have done quite a bit when all I wanted to do was write few words to share the post below that first ran here in 2014. FYI, I am not ready to share my new work yet but will start showing it in the coming weeks–on a day when I am more certain of things.

Much of my work seemingly has a journey or a quest as its central theme. But the odd thing is that I don’t have a solid idea of what the object is that I am seeking in this work. I have thought it was many things over the years, things like wisdom and knowledge and inner peace and so on. But it comes down to a more fundamental level or at least I think so this morning. It may change by this afternoon.

I think I am looking for an end to doubt or at least coming to an acceptance of my own lack of answers for the questions that have often hung over us all.

I would say the search is for certainty but as Voltaire points out above, certainty is an absurd condition. That has been my view for some time as well. Whenever I feel certainty coming on in me in anything I am filled with an overriding anxiety.

I do not trust certainty.

I look at it as fool’s gold and when I see someone speak of anything with absolute certainty–particularly politicians and televangelists– I react with a certain degree of mistrust, probably because I see this absolutism leading to an extremism that has been the basis for many of the worst misdeeds throughout history. Wars and holocausts, slavery and genocide–they all arose from some the beliefs held by one party in absolute certainty.

So maybe the real quest is for a time and place where uncertainty is the order of the day, where certainty is vanquished. A place where no person can say with any authority that they are above anyone else, that anyone else can be subjugated to their certainty.

To say that we might be better off in a time with such uncertainty sounds absurd but perhaps to live in a time filled with absolute certainty is even more so.

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Looking For a Mooring

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on March 21, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Anchor— At West End Gallery

It is a strange freedom to be adrift in the world of men without a sense of anchor anywhere. Always there is the need of mooring, the need for the firm grip on something that is rooted and will not give. The urge to be accountable to someone, to know that beyond the individual himself there is an answer that must be given, cannot be denied.

–Howard Thurman, The Inward Journey (1961)

I wrote a couple of weeks back about how part of my response to the veritable dismantling of this country that is taking place was a feeling of grief for something lost. I think that lost something could be defined as many things– a loss of belief, loss of security, loss of trust, loss of respect, loss of pride, loss of honor, loss of community, and on and on.

So much has seemingly– and perhaps irrevocably– been lost by so many that there may not be a single definition that covers our loss.

For me, I define my grief as being for the loss of bearings, of losing a sense of having an anchor that I could rely on at any given time, one that let me know who and where and what I was in relation the world at that given moment.

A sense of place. Of home.

It makes me ache to write about this feeling of loss. It is one of feeling unmoored and adrift in a fast-moving current. Looking back, I can catch a brief glimpse of that place, but it fades further into the distance with each successive glance.

Can I escape this current? Can we? And if I do and somehow find my way back to some of that same sense of home, will these feelings of loss subside?

Can it ever be the same anchor that I once thought it was?

I don’t think anyone really knows that answer. I sure as hell don’t. And I don’t think speculating on it matters. Because if we cannot escape that rushing current, the path back is gone forever.

I know this sounds too stark, too grim. Grief is like that. Even so, it not without hope.

Hope has not been completely lost.

I can still look back and see home, as I define it, in the distance. It’s there and, therefore, a way to it must exist.

We just got to get back to it, one way or another, because where we’re at now ain’t home.

Here’s a favorite song, one of many, from Talking Heads. This is This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody) from their great 1984 concert film Stop Making Sense.

FYI– Howard Thurman (1899-1981), who is quoted at the top, was an American author, philosopher, theologian, Christian mystic, educator, and civil rights leader. He was considered a mentor to MLK and other civil rights leaders.

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Hold Back the River

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on March 20, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Nightbloom— At West End Gallery

The melancholy river bears us on. When the moon comes through the trailing willow boughs, I see your face, I hear your voice and the bird singing as we pass the osier bed. What are you whispering? Sorrow, sorrow. Joy, joy. Woven together, like reeds in moonlight.

–Virginia Woolf, A Haunted House, and Other Short Stories (1921)

What do I have to say this morning? Is there anything that needs to be said? Any grievances, worries, sorrows, joys, that need to be expressed if only to feel as though they have been released from within, even in this little forum?

There’s a desire to say much this morning. But the will to do so is not there.

Maybe that’s the melancholy river bearing on us? I don’t know but that feels right this morning, sitting here in a darkened studio with the glow of my computer screen serving as moonlight.

And in it is sorrow and joy, woven together.

I am going to let the river flow by this morning. Here’s a song, Hold Back the River, whose title and lyrics says something quite different, about not allowing time and tide to wash away the moment. I don’t know if that’s absolutely correct but, as they say, you get what you pay for. This song written and performed by James Bay is from about ten years back. I have to admit that even though it was a platinum record at the time, I was unaware of it before this morning. It’s hard enough keeping up with old music, let alone everything new. But I liked the song and this performance and felt it kind of fit.

Give a listen them step aside– you’re blocking my view of the river.

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Imagination or Headache?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on March 12, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Sea of the Six Moons– At West End Gallery

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 Gems exhibit. 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 Dolphins from 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.

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