7:55 AM UPDATE: The third and final painting for this auction reached its set goal of $1000! Thanks to everyone for making this a great fundraiser.
Many, many thanks to everyone for making a success of the auction to benefit the rescue and rehabilitation of Australian wildlife affected by the recent wildfires there. On each of the last two days, paintings put up for auction reached their set goals, moving the amount raised closer to the $4000 mark I arbitrarily set as a goal.
Now if we can have the third and final piece sell, we’re there.
That final painting is Part of the Pattern. I have set a Buy Now price of $1000 on it, with an opening bid of $400. I knew when I chose this piece for this auction that it would be the last to go. It is a bit more personal in its view, a bit more narrow in its appeal and attuned to my own beliefs. That it speaks loudly and clearly to me doesn’t mean that it will have the same effect across the board.
While I keep telling myself that my feeling are strong enough that I should just keep it, it remains a painting that I am willing to part with, not for money for myself, but in order to do something good. I want that for this painting– that it does something good now and perhaps again later, at some future point in the life of whoever obtains it.
To that end, I am promising that if someone bids the Buy Now price of $1000, there will be a special added gift with it. I am not disclosing what this is but if you know my past, you will recognize that this is not an empty promise. My credo has always been to give a bit more than people expect. It’s a lousy way to do business but it helps me sleep at night.
So, take a look at yesterday’s post for the rules of the auction and bid. You’ll be getting a painting that I think is special along with an added gift but more than that, your bid will provide a lot of help for creatures that are trapped in the midst of a true environmental tragedy.
Thanks for helping out.
Here’s a post I wrote about Part of the Pattern several years back that better explains how I see it:
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There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns. If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself. What we call chaos is just patterns we haven’t recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can’t decipher. What we can’t understand we call nonsense. What we can’t read we call gibberish.
–Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor
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I tend to agree with the snippet above from Chuck Palahniuk’s book.
Everything is built upon pattern. Who we are and how we behave. History. Science. Music and art. It is all dictated by patterns.
Most of us don’t dwell too long on identifying patterns in the world around us and some of us will even refuse to acknowledge the predominance of pattern in the world, believing everything is random and chaotic. I suppose that in itself is part of a pattern, a larger one that is so encompassing that we can’t see it from our vantage point within it.
Just speculating there, of course.
I know that I am always looking for pattern, even when I’m not really looking. I call it pattern, rhythm, flow, sense of rightness and other terms, without knowing why I am drawn to this concept. It just attracts me in that it is so much part of everything that there must surely be significance.
All of this flowed forward with this new painting, a 4″ by 17″ piece on paper that I’m calling Part of the Pattern. It’s based on a theme I’ve used several times recently of pools rising through a tall vertical picture plane like ladder rungs. This particular piece was so much more stylized in its forms that it really became more about pattern than subject. I see it both as a landscape and as some sort of underlying pattern that makes up the landscape. A sort of DNA-like structure on which the world is built. Whatever it is, it holds my eye and makes me keep searching for something in it.
“Part of the Pattern” in the Studio
Redtree Times 