Monday, December 29, 2014

ready to move into the next year

And now we move into the new year, though it feels the same as the last year.  Will this new year be one of change, of revelatory insights, of new horizons?  Will it be a step in the direction of discovering new methods, new shapes, new beauty?


ink watercolor dye acrylic rives bfk 22x30

my mother and banking

My mother told me once how she learned about banking and how money works: "When I was young my father made me put very nickel in the bank, even every penny I might find.  Then it got to be 1932 and all the banks closed.  I learned everything that day."


Everything had broken down in any case, and new things had to to be made out of the fragments. -Kurt Schwitters, 1930


collage, rives bfk 11x15


collage rives bfk 11x15


collage rives bfk 11x15

Tuesday, December 23, 2014

I seem to be doing it again

I am repeating once again the same thing I did before...delicate balanced not my style kind of stuff...maybe it's just the season or something...I don't know, but here it is, once again...actually it is kinda pretty.


dye ink acrylic oil  rives bfk 11x15


acrylic pencil watercolor ink rives bfk 11x15


dye  rives bfk 11x15

Friday, December 19, 2014

hiraeth

hiraeth -(n.) a homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, a home which maybe never was; the nostalgia, the yearning, the grief for the lost places of your past.


dye acrylic ink watercolor pencil rives bfk 11x15


dye ink watercolor  rives bfk 11x15


acrylic watercolor dye ink  rives bfk 11x15


whiskers last paw print
dye rives bfk 11x15

Tuesday, December 16, 2014

the voice

You might sometimes think that accidents only occur sometimes, only occasionally in painting because after all don't they always look just like the painter's other work?   You also search for signs of growth and progress -like say Whistler's use of color or his white paintings. 

And at the same time we search for a unity in their work, a voice speaking to us.  I think most often of this voice, what it sounds like and what it is saying.  Does it speak to us of our own joys and struggles?  Does it say these things in a way that encourages empathy?


ink watercolor rives bfk 11x15


ink watercolor rives bfk 11x15


ink watercolor rives bfk 11x15


ink watercolor rives bfk 11x15

American Painters in France

I've been reading this wonderful book about 18th and 19th century American painters in France...it might sound dull but it is full of incident that really blew my mind...early on it it is stuffed with painters incidentally trading arms, during the French revolution they are going after abandoned paintings and buying and selling oceans of barely legal work they get from escaping aristocrats, the words and phrases are exquisite.


collage dye watercolor ink rives bfk 11x15


collage dye watercolor ink rives bfk 11x15


collage dye watercolor ink rives bfk 11x15


collage dye watercolor ink rives bfk 11x15

Friday, December 12, 2014

who knows

But who knows?  I certainly do not.  I mean once in a while I do, at least for awhile I do.  But then I get lost and I no longer know anything, and so I've got to start over somehow.  


watercolor and ink rives bfk 11x15


watercolor and ink 11x12.5


watercolor and ink rives bfk 11x15


watercolor and ink rives bfk 11x15

The way I feel

I don't do these very often.  It's not that I don't like them.  I do like them.  But I don't trust them.  They are too easy, too glib, and after one second of looking at them you are done.  At least that is my feeling.







Monday, December 8, 2014

flow river flow

One's life, from being an exterior thing, grows inwards.  Its intensity stays the same; and d'you know, it's most mysterious, the corners in which the joy of living can sometimes hide away. -Blaise cendrars


ink & watercolor rives 11x15


ink and watercolor rives 11x15


ink and watercolor rives 11x15

Wednesday, December 3, 2014

The angel is my watermark

The angel is there like a watermark a guarantee of your faultless vision. The angel has no goiter; it is the artist who has the goiter.  The angel is there to drop a sprig of parsley in your omelette, to put a shamrock in your buttonhole.  I could scrub the the mythology out of the horses mane; I could scrub the yellow out of the Yangtsze Kiang;  I could scrub the date out of the man in the gondola; I could scrub the clouds and the tissue paper in which were wrapped the bouquets with forked lightning...But the angel I can't scrub out.  The angel is my watermark.  -Henry Miller


acrylic, collage dye, nail polish on rives bfk 11x15


gouache, acrylic, dye on rives bfk 11x15


dye, ink, watercolor on rive bfk 15x22


dye, collage, watercolor, graphite, ink and gouache rives bfk 15x22

the young painter

I know I've talked about this before but I am thinking about it again.  And maybe you weren't there then when I first discussed it.  The light was beautiful that day as it was everyday in Los Angeles in 1956.  I was inside my head that day -deep inside and happy and lonely and warm.  It was our first large painting day.  I was using a bunch of reds and yellows...but I decided to cover it all with blue, with every blue.  I found I could make up blues using little bits of other colors.  I felt I was in heaven, in fact I had a foot in heaven's door.  

After a while I noticed that almost everyone was gone.  I was alone with what I felt was a masterpiece in the making.  My happiness overflowed and seeped out of me onto the table, the floor, the walls of the schoolroom, to the face of the clock... I was possessed...there was more than a hint of madness flowing through me.


dye, acrylic, ink, watercolor  rives bfk 11X15


acrylic, ink, watercolor rives bfk 11X15


acrylic, dye, watercolor rive bfk 11X15