Thursday, September 26, 2013

the angel is my watermark

I didn't mean to have her in here I don't think...but I look and there she is the focus of the painting.  How are you my beauty?...I'm glad to see you.  It appears you are here to wish me good luck and to bring happiness...and you are made of a candy wrapper...!



I read yesterday where Marc Rothko said -My paintings are not me, they are not-me.  I found that strange.  I've always found them so deep so profound...but if it is true what he says, then what a miracle that he could create them...



Mine are always me...the expression is always me.  One will be so sharp and clear, the next mushy and combed with what seem like paste.  I look at it the very next day and I think, I wanted to achieve that and I did.  But I don't remember how.   



Some of them I love and they seem unruly and undisciplined...yet I have not the heart to discipline them, I accept them just as they are.


And others appear as an ocean of peace for me, in both their yellows and their greens.


No matter what I do...they all just get done.  Some months from now, If I were to look once again at them I would probably only remember one or two...



And soon it will be Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas once more.   It all tumbles over itself, each holiday arguing with each other to be the happiest, the most memorable, the one one with the special sparkle.


What a crazy time it is.  The leaves are beginning to change color, the wind is blowing and -believe it or not, the yellow stripes in the center of the road have slipped and slid over two feet each.  Now one side of the road is wider than the other.


Friday, September 20, 2013

dirty and greasy

These all seem a bit dirty and greasy to me.  Sort of like a recently abandoned factory.  Maybe I'm remembering Detroit where I lived for eleven years.  Not that it was dirty or greasy.  It wasn't.  It was really quite a magnificent experience.  The most lovely and beautiful people.


But it had abandoned factories and abandoned streets even then.  And of course it had many many old American cars driving around.  And at that time I collected rust.   


And these old cars often dropped small pieces of rust.  I mean often enough so that when I would be walking I could find one or two.  My favorites were two little pieces connected together that actually moved.  Those were cool.  And I like metal so old and rusted it was like lace.


I'd bring these home and add them to my pretty substantial collection.   I only hope that now there is some rust collector who still has access to it.  I no longer can find any at all.


I do believe these remind me of the rust I collected.  The rust and the wet sewers on the street and in parking lots.  All the detritus you could see everywhere.


Don't you know, my blue bubble friend in this future of yours, as you work on the art project you will be working on then, maybe detritus is a word you may use as you describe this era.  Maybe this attempt to collect and preserve this abundance of waste is at the center of it.


And there is some kind of attempt to document my own wasteful life.  A la TS Eliot I think...We are the hollow men headpiece full of straw...


Of course someone is right now documenting their life hopefully in the same way.  But with writing.  That would be fun to read.  -walked 26 steps to the door of Blick Art supply.  10 min. in store.  Bought ink.  Got back in car.  Drove 1.7 miles home...


Sounds like Alain Robbe-Grillet don't it a little.  Of course he is sadly gone.  Ah, maybe it is some new kid I don't know yet.  Where does he live my blue bubble friend?

Monday, September 16, 2013

What am I going to do?

What am I going to do?  If I run out of things to say.  It's what I usually feel when I start the blog.  But I never run out of things to say because really I never really say anything anyhow.


I used to write to my blue bubble friend.  He lives in the future and wants to write something original for his art class.  So he picked something not so original but at least unknown.  Me.  And it made him feel safer.  No comparisons necessary in a way.  He could make any points or comparisons he wants and not have to worry about them too much.

But also a funny, a kind of odd sort of something, happened.  Thank god.  He began to like my work.  He in fact grew surprisingly to admire it in the way he pretended to admire it.  He found it amusing, disturbing almost, a sort of uniqueness seemed to show up in it that he hadn't realized was there.


And he even thought he sort of liked the muddy colors.  He certainly liked all the trash in them since each item is so gone so old fashioned.  And he actually laughed once or twice when he discovered special relationships among the trash.  And he came up with an idea.  Since they are for the most part carefully dated, he thought he would go through them and discuss what different kinds of trash meant.


Like, well it's getting toward Thanksgiving and Christmas  (remember those things?) and special wrapping paper starts to appear, more batteries, and I don't know, uh candy wrappers etc. all the junk that comes through then.


And in the autumn there are the sorts of things you expect like ant poison and papers from and about his kid's schools.  That was sort of easy and fun. 


But of course he has to talk about composition and structure.  All the stuff that is so boring really.


But suddenly, out of nowhere, he came across the oceans of letters I had written him so long ago (not really because this dumb shit came in my house and stole all of those early this year).  Well maybe they turn up or maybe I've got photographs of them.  At any rate in my fantasy he has them and they really do seem to be to him.  Him alone.


And they touch him.  They reach in to his desperate and lonely heart.  And he is taken.  He becomes a convert.  He must rewrite.  Start over.  Take this seriously. He works with fire now.  He uncovers a cache of personal artifacts and communication with others...

Ten years later he is done.  Of course this was only the beginning of his career.  He later uncovers more outliers, stars of the chaotic movement those planos we now call The Recoverists, those artists from the early 21st century, whose work expressed the need to celebrate the greatness and shabbiness of what had already past in those last days of that country. Now it is five separate countries.

He is my one fan. And greatest fan.  And in fact my only fan.  My blue bubble friend. 
Hello my dear friend.  This is for you. 


Thursday, September 12, 2013

Here we are. Again.

Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue.  It is through disobedience that progress has been made, disobedience and through rebellion.
- Oscar Wilde (1897)


Well here we are.   Again.  You and I.   It is quiet out there is it not?  It's  5:16 in the morning.  The only creature I've seen are my cats and outside a rabbit.  A little guy.

Speaking of which, I was just reading Alice's Adventures in Wonderland again, but I had to stop because the type in this new edition is too small for me.  I gotta find the older edition around here.


Have you read Joseph Delteil's The Passion of Joan of Arc ?  I love that book as well as the movie they made of it.

Don't worry we won't be talking about films here cause I don't even get them, like I don't even understand them.  In fact if I listed my top 10 films, I think that would cover all the films I like at all.


I like thinking about the movies I want them to make.  One on Blaise Cendrars certainly.  And one on Andre Breton and his crowd as the war began. Andre Masson along with Max Ernst and the rest of the guys who worked on the Tarot cards with them.  I know. Tristan didn't work on them. But we should get him in the film.  Squeeze him in the opening.


And what a great movie can be made of Eugina Errazuriz...What a trip...!  Everyone can be in it. Picasso, Cocteau, Sargent, every great designer...and the mysteries of her life...the connections. I'm not thinking of Picasso so much, but of Cendrars and the tower she had built for him...but think of them all, what a great movie, let's go see it...but can I get get the thick illustrated book first...!!?



What a liar. I wasted my last nickel talking about movies...

Thursday, September 5, 2013

intransient

Really I believe it is all intransigent ephemeral unlasting unimportant even and the aspirations surrounding it at least as it reads are just a wishbone.  For what?   For what reason?


And for whom?  There is a question.   Does one wish to become famous?  Well maybe they do.  But not me.  I don't have the time anymore.  I've got to keep up daily inspection of the street work.  Get out there and concentrate to keep all the work rolling.



And there is sleeping.  I gotta do that when it's dark and quiet.  Before 6 a.m. that's for sure.  And there's the question of how to get the boys to school, when to wash clothes feed the cat and don't forget the lizard.



And there are these mad things.  I find a bunch of the trash walking my boy to school and cleaning the garden.  And the junk I gotta buy an stuff.  And wrapping presents for birthdays.  This kind a stuff makes me happy.  It's fun.  Now the painting well I don't exactly know how it fits.



And anyway I mean who says these are paintings or anything at all.  It doesn't really matter.  It is all very very impermanent it is all a high speed movement of chaos and change.  Collisions and strange unusual meetings an epitome of meeting and of loss.

Now maybe one of you might accidentally think this is cynical but it is not.   It is only the state of the world the speed at which it turns the heightened state of our emotions the strange seemingly mad rate at which new things happen and old things pass on.

One time when I was very young I was with my dad in the car, a woody by the way, and we passed three tents on the highway on our way out of Los Angeles.  There were some grubby looking men standing there and I asked my dad who they were.   He said they are the very last Indians and soon they will be extinct.  Of course he was very very wrong.  But I remember how I felt sad then.  I don't like to see the ending of anything at all really.

Maybe that is why I paint as I do.