valentine

these are just a few of some old valentines we made...there are dozens of others...but I'll have to check and see if I can find them...these are all about 4x6...not fancy or anything....but have a happy valentine's day

more mud

mud cannot scream

it flows through the rivers and streams 

it can lie still and suck on your boots

it gurgles and blurps and dries on your child's feet

collage ink pencil   rives bfk 11x15

ink  rives bfk 11x15

Robert Walser Mark Rothko and me

There is no such thing as abstract...there are only things which we do not fully comprehend...and so, well we call them abstract.  When I was in DC with my boys we went to the Phillips Collection, which is totally groovy.  While there I walked into the Rothko room, the dreamiest sexiest room in America.  One large Rothko on each of four walls.  I went up to the guard and asked him if they could bring a bed into the center of the room so I could take a nap.

I don't know for certain what Rothko wanted to achieve but I know the sort of absence and chant I felt at that moment.  I wish you all could have been there with me, each of us snuggled up in cozy chairs in that room, each with our backs to the other, each of us asleep and dreaming...each of us would have a copy of Robert Walser's The Walk (middleton trns.) which we were reading as we fell asleep and now lies snuggled close to us...

watercolor ink  rives bfk 11x15

collage pencil watercolor ink  rives bfk 11x15

what can mud mean?

I misquoted some lyrics to myself and accidentally made new ones up that could possibly be a song:

mud isn't dirty

mud isn't clean

mud isn't jumping

mud doesn't dream

...or maybe not huh? But it does remind me of this painting which was made of using a carton topper (you know the stuffed paper put in some packages) and I painted the bottom sheet with watercolor and the topper with ink and watercolor and stuck them together with some forever glue from Japan.

I don't think it is much but it is pretty to look at...honest.  Maybe you would need to come see it for  yourself...

collage watercolor ink  rives bfk 15x22

hello. Again. You have grown.

Yes, this one has grown, actually four times as big as age was then.  And I like this one, violet, grey, and green.  It seems almost as if I'm seeing someone, no maybe two people sitting on the other side of a fire.  

Though that is too simple -and desecrates the beauty of the curved lines. This is wholly one thing, a one thing we all see so often but never quite recognize. We see it as we sit by a fire, or when we garden outside, or when we nap and then wake just as it's getting dark. We see it in the covers on a bed, on the rug on the floor, in the pages of a magazine briefly glimpsed...and most often in our strange and weak visual memory,  deep within the depths of those far memories, they get fuzzier as we stare, and then become tinged with something, what for a better name we call sadness, ennui, not ever quite graspable, a thing slipping past recognition...

watercolor  rives bfk 22x30