Friday, January 31, 2014

it all goes up in smoke

Of course eventually it all goes up in smoke.  You move on you keep painting some I guess your something else happens things go gigety gangely and poof you are an even more worn out version of yourself.


You go to the doctor and get an injection against infection you take multi-pills and go exercise and call people on the telephone or even worse have to answer your own phone.


You walk down the path you walked up a few hours ago you search for a metal turning thing but they are no longer in the playground.


Things used to be a stones throw away and now we all just throw stones everyday and everyday.


You can only get awake and you can only believe and in the end you just pretend.


But it all goes up in smoke.


And then it is gone.

Wednesday, January 29, 2014

stone throw

Well here we go getting to the bottom of the pile the ones my brother took pictures of at least I think so. - Lightroom is so confusing to me I never am quite sure where everything is.


These must be October then since November and December are both gone now.


This was a strange month as several ideas collided in a struggle for resolution.


These all seem happy though as each one moves toward its finality -or maybe since these are it then these must be it.


They just seem relaxed okay with themselves happy to be the end.

Tuesday, January 28, 2014

McCabe Ash

Well this first one has this beautiful bicycle that McCabe made and gave me...!  He insisted that that put it in one of my paintings.  Finally -four years later -I got it in.  I love all his work, I love the man, and I miss him and his children.


If you are ever in Ann Arbor, go see him on Main Street, because he is the best framer I know of...


 ahh, this is an eclectic collection.  Or it seems to me to be. Though I'm sure after I look at it a bit, it will seem anything but eclectic.  Some harmonious whole. -if I'm lucky.


there's a quote from jack Kerouac something like -"any erasure is a sin" meaning get it all down confess everything but never take something out.


I guess we are moving into red and orange now -it gets very intense in here.


and it feels good to get some relief some kind of release from it.


before diving back in swimming in it.


and finally getting out for good...


finding some smaller more relaxed format.


That allows us time to sharpen our knife

Monday, January 27, 2014

ungraspable

and so things move on through faster and faster. as your hands try to grasp the ungraspable.


as your eyes catch only a flicker of the unseeable -your heart feels the terrible pain of the now unknowable. life has cheated you. it doesn't matter.  time passes by like a vicious winter wind.
as you tighten up against this all things have changed.  you smile on a nothingness.


how can this be. again. but when did this happen? what slight bit of what was it? color water?
how can this painting become traitorous?


one sees in it something no longer quite the same no not at all the same. why does it wish this on you.  when did this dream begin?


and in a final moment you have gone from outside to inside.  now movement is life. all must keep moving. and moving you as you move it.

Sunday, January 26, 2014

create the same

Sometimes you are just trying to create the same. again and again.  not different. but the same same. like in a dream where it is important to get back to one point and then step forward again.  but you end up repeating this step over and over. it cannot be identicated.


because. each time you repeat this step everything changes.  it may be only slight. but of course this is a dream and in dreams the slightest change creates vast changes in the atmosphere.  the entire pangea is become other.  the other is no longer recognizable.


all events have slid slightly sideways and nothing will line up correctly. like the tiny differences between people, which in their totality -their new totality -create suddenly unempathetic beings. so close but with differences that are monstrous wedges between them. events will never line up again for the same recreation.


yet as these entities grow and decay and disappear the differences are unnoticeable.  one cannot explain them in a meaningful way.  When they failed you was it they who failed or you who failed to make a tiny adjustment. all movement decordinates.


And almost immediately. as soon as the lights flicker off for a moment then come back on.  The images exist but with a perceptible. an utter change. a flaw so fatal. the veiled object no longer carries you within it.


The letters

The moon like a disc a black and dark green in the center.  Hence the green shadow generally recorded. -Frederick Detwiller


In reality we were in a Great Shadow staring at the distance all bathed in a cold light reflected from the corona and Moon. F. Detwiller


I also had a dream in which I had been making a new earth including the flesh and grease of animals.  The pile heated and burned and in places -and the surface gave way in places and smoke came up.  Thus the earth -in places was made.
-letter from unknown person


Unfortunately for Astronomy, the great expenditure and ridicule of its pay;  while the great sun looks down upon many serious mortals searching for the cause of a strange visitor.  Eclipse. -Mrs. Helen Hartman


The higher you get. the stronger the current of air the more air running.  They have got to put wireless on to your hearing.  I think that is what I got.  They can talk right down through my mouth like a gramophone no one else can hear them.  -Mrs. Alice May Williams


But I really think there are holes in the sky that open out into the other world and sometimes comes out like a moon sometimes.  -Mrs. Alice May Williams


And sometimes these things just seem weird to me like someone else made it, and I don't get it at all.

Friday, January 24, 2014

I've run out

I understand, and not knowing how to express myself without using pagan words, I remain silent. -Arthur Rimbaud


The alchemy lies in this formula: your memory and your senses are but the nourishment of your creative impulses. -Arthur Rimbaud


I have always wished to make paintings with no color, no line, no form, no nothing.  In fact I have only wished for them to appear miraculously, when I wake in the morning.


People would tell me stories when I was young, and I would wonder what they meant by them, why tell me now, why do I need to hear this story?  


One of the reasons I write these things is simply to slow myself down.  I can't type fast and I am even slower using a pencil…why can't I use a pencil on this computer?  I want to slow myself down in order to force myself to look at these things.


And somehow one always gets to the end. I always find endings to be sad, even though they are often only the beginning of something new.  I don't like new.  It just looks like old.

Thursday, January 23, 2014

again we got em

Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions -when it ceases to be dangerous you don't want it.  -Duke Ellington


We all do "doh re mi" -but you got to find the other notes yourself. -Louis Armstrong


I'll play it first and tell you what it is later. -Miles Davis


We live in a world with more and more information, and less and less meaning. -Jean Baudrillard


Ellington has created not only a new art form but a new reason to live.  -Blaise Cendrars


These seem simple and calm.
  Sometimes you gotta play a long time to play like yourself. -Miles Davis


You've got to find some way of saying it without saying it. -Duke Ellington


Directly across the street stands a fire hydrant.  They are not new.  They are old.  Some men were out there working on it.  It stands in all its unassuming beauty -and it almost seems already a relic.  Some revenant of a past long gone.  

Wednesday, January 22, 2014

yellow 2

ofttimes you are just dreamin' when you paint and a bunch sorta just come out.


though it is always more fun when my gives me his rejects...


but I really like these formless things that just happen...



but then they can turn serious...


and once in a blue moon they actually look angry...


I should stamp all these with Thank you Clea & Guilbert -without whom all of these would have been impossible.