Nature's first form

Nature's first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold. -Robert Frost

Nature is ever at work, building and pulling down, creating and destroying, keeping everything whirling and flowing, allowing no rest but in rhythmical motion, chasing everything in endless song out of one beautiful form into another. -John Muir

You paint the way you have to in order to give.  That's life itself, and someone will look and say it is the product of knowing, but it has nothing to do with knowing, it has to do with giving.  -Franz Kline

collage from 2011

Some older collage work from April 2011...I very seldom go back and look at these but I was just loading these in lightroom and they amused me for some reason...

satellite of love

Satellites gone up to the sky. Things like that drive me out of my mind.

I watched it for a little while I love to watch things on t.v.

Satillites gone way up to Mars.  Soon it will be filled with parking cars.  

I watched it for a little bit.  I love to watch things on t.v.

Ooh ah Satellite of love
Satellite of love
Satellite Satillite of love
satellite

oldboy

I was foolin around trying out the computer to see how to upload/download that sort a thing and I ended up with a few of these old pictures.

test

These are a few of the countless dryer lint paintings I did at the time.  I'll put up some new ones later on.  Actually I think they haven't really changed much since then. That's okay.  Though I really enjoyed doing more pencil work then and now there's a bunch less.

alchemy

Many voices, even from within their own ranks, were raised against the "obscure idioms" of the alchemists.  And their own account of their communication technique hardly sounds more encouraging..."Wherever we have spoken openly we have actually said nothing. But where we have written something in code and in pictures we have concealed the truth." -Rosarium Philosophorum, Weinheim Edition, 1990

Everything that deceives can be said to enchant. -Plato

In the matter of furnishing, I find a certain absence of ugliness far worse than ugliness. -Colette

It was in the very act of communicating with others that I came into a more intimate contact with myself. -Anias Nin

Sometimes I do fake Picassos myself. -Picasso

The thing is to become a master, and in your old age to acquire the courage to do what children did when they knew nothing. -Henry Miller

Oh my God. Something happened.  Lower the curtain.  last words of Chung Ling Soo

take our quick survey

I like this one a great deal although I didn't like making it so much cause it took a bunch of work.  It is actually better in person when it lays there and looks up at you in this sullen way.

Now usually I avoid talking about the paintings themselves cause what can you say?  I like this one but not this one or something idiotic like that...when in truth I like them all.  I am happy to be the medium through which they show up.

And I am the happiest when I find peace for me through them.  And who knows what that means?

You know all the young girls in my family are getting married at practically the same time.  It seems sort of joyous to me.   They all make me happy.  And all the newest ones are all boys.  Hmmm?

There is little I have to contribute it seems.  If I could I would just shut up and post the photographs.  Yea I should try that and see how it feels...

halloween 2013

well it is getting close and closer.  That is the day of halloween that hallowed day that marks the beginning of the entire season which always feels to me like an explosion at the end of a movie.

It was though...when I was young...a long entire season...and Halloween never smooshed into Christmas nor even into Thanksgiving.

It was its own time.  It happened early in the mid autumn.  Where I grew up there may have been a slight weather change if anything.

But this vivid acrylic red suddenly stands out as a Halloween color...and it gains some intimacy which he really doesn't have.

Beak and claw, remorse reminder

Slide and tumble, slide and stumble

Back and forth and back to nothing

Keep them tidy, keep them humble -Eno

Chop and change to cut the corners

Sharp as razors, shiny razors

Stranded on a world that's dying 

Never moving, hardly trying.

It is odd how every thing alters to fit some preconception some fomented time or strange icon.  I don't really like that feeling at all.

Maybe that is why I like brown.  The mother color. the original color.

I enjoy the peace it gives me the smoth gradations a sort of mystical harmony I feel with it.

late October walking down the alley

It's funny as I walk down the alley with my little boy on the way to school.  He holds my hand sometimes as I walk with my eyes to the ground searching  for stuff I can use in my paintings.

I stumble as I tread through stooping to pick things up or scratching the dirt to get them loose.  Would this count as part of the time it takes to make a painting...?

I'm just looking for junk  And I even mumble like an old man as I turn things over in my fingers and check both sides of it...occasionally I will drop it and say something like it needs more trucks more time

I find myself missing the old days when there was more junk everywhere when trash grew on trees and money could always be found on the street...of course none of this true I guess...though there was a time when everything was more brutal...when littering was a point of pride...

Now a well bent and crushed bottle cap is a great find...of course coffee lids are everywhere.  I can remember when smooched army men were the common litter of every alley.

keeping flow

Making the simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity. -Charlie Mingus

I am happy just to make anything, anything without thought without a clear reference to anything at all really.

What I fear is that I'll wake up and I'll think I don't like this stuff, I'm done with it, I'm just not doing it anymore.

And then I begin to fall, I spin and fall and think, oh how I hate thinking, and you wonder what to do, what is good and practical, what is fun and stupid, what is at all...?

But this keeps me from going there.  Cause I can forget these for a week or two, and then I come across them, and I think well that is pretty, and that is all it takes to make me happy.

When it is working, you completely go into another place, you're tapping into things that are totally universal, completely beyond your ego and your own self.  That's what it is all about.  -Keith Haring

Yep.  It can be a rush that is the doing of it not standing in front of it looking at it though now that I think of it that of course can be a rush too.  I've stood there and imagined the entire process, thought about how the artist felt what he was thinking about, how the creativity hit him and carried him.  Sort of like body surfing if you've ever done that.  You feel it for hours after you're done.  You feel the motion and the force of the wave as it carries you.

what were we saying?

The important thing is to remember what most impressed you and to get it on canvas as fast as possible. -Pierre Bonnard

Much of what I do has that very quality to it.  I find it almost essential to the conception of each piece, the fundament of its creation and development.

Of course we don't wanna fly off the handle.  Get to far into that purple prose an you'll think you are writtin' poetry.  But you got to admit you are doing something.  Something that in each and every turn is beyond you.

I mean its not the work that is tough no it is the concept the image or maybe it is the diaphanous idea that simply cannot be quite understood can't quite find a landing spot.

Well whatever that means...I can't really go there or it begins to feel like I'm writing for some arts magazine.  Yet I do want to express what I'm trying to reach, what I'm attempting to prove point by point painting by painting.  And maybe it is best to let the paintings do that.

All profound distraction opens certain doors.  You have to allow yourself to be distracted when you are unable to concentrate.  -Julio Cortazar