Garden Spline

It turns out that I cannot exactly choose what I want to do.  I've been trying to move off the image I've been painting and I thought I could deliberately get to a new thing -you know like start in, it gets rough for awhile then you settle in.  

...but that didn't happen at least not yet...it appears that there is something in this image that I have not yet discovered and it keeps calling me...and try as I might I keep going back to it.

Even the colors remain the same.  It used to bother me how artists seem to find a way to paint...and then they won't move off it.  Now I am one of those.  Like being stuck in Motherwell's open series or making Kandinsky's paintings over and over.  

Oh well.  So be it hey?  I'm painting the images I see when I look at a tree.  It is a botanical garden in paint.  It is the dirt below The soil down there and the mulch.

It is the bizarre images left by the ice and snow and the frozen trash that blows in the yard the strange reflective glare of water on the leaves and of my image reflected in the window pane.

We used to have deer all over the yard and I built a hosta garden out back.  It worked...!  They ate those hostas to the ground but stayed away from my hydrangeas up close to the house.

Maybe I am like the deer and stick with the hostas.  I paint an image that is close to me.

And I come back to it again and again...maybe if I do it again I will finally capture it.  Or maybe it is like trying to capture Paris in photographs.  They almost always need to be up close.  And it takes thousands.  

Im reading Cervantes right now and his myopic vision, well not his but Don Quixote's, is right for me.  He continually interprets the world with his own vision of what it is.  His adventures are always close to home.  He is noble to a fault, and his fault is his own imposition on the world.  Or more accurately, his vision.

Once a long time ago now my mother went to visit her mother in Georgia.  She was sleeping in the small room at the end of the hallway set off from the rest of the house.  One night as she was just going to sleep she opened her eyes and there in front of her was a man.  Being as brave as she was, she jumped up.  The man ran out the door and down the hallway and slipped inside her mother's room.

My mom raced there and pounded on the locked door.  A minute later her mother opened it.  My mother looked around in surprise.  No one was there.  She told her mother what had just happened and her mom laughed and said -Oh Pat that is just the old Indian.

After my mom told me that story I thought I never want to inherit those abilities.  Never.

Prevenient grace

Sometimes you're moving forward and sometimes you're moving backward...and sometimes you don't know which way you're moving at all.  In fact most times I guess.

It's okay too.  They are all experiments of a type -if they even reach that level.  

It is only sensible sometimes maybe those times when I consciously so to speak -reach back to another time a moment when I was lost in grief lost in memory lost to the world and existing as we all do at times in a past that will never exist again.  And of course that will be a sea of memories.

This happens to all of us.  We may be trying to remember the scene of a movie or a scene in which we did not partake of the action but were on the sideline as a witness to the event.  In fact that may be how much of our lives are lived.  

Maybe most of our lives.  We are all imbued with this prevenient grace and I can remember how as a child I felt it tangibly.  I'd ask my mother if guardian angels really existed and she assured me they do.  And I asked about elves and fairies and she assured me they do -but she warned me to stay away from them as they are capricious and wayward.

It's funny.  Once, I was at a school concert in high school and for some reason I decided to go outside.  It was wet and rainy. No one was out there except two girls who I had never seen before.  I went up and spoke to them.  They said they were witches and asked if I would give them a ride home.  Normally I would say no and move on.  But for some stupid reason I said yes.  Maybe it was because they were both pretty or something.  No, it was because they were gentle.  

So I was driving them somewhere and it took us right by my house.  And again for some wacky reason we stopped there.  Why was that?  And where was everyone?  I had a large family and someone was always home.  But not that night.  So I asked these girls if they had like powers and they said yes would you like to see them?  And I said yea sure,  show me.  

They said well primarily we see the dead.  Hmm I thought I didn't like where this was going but I couldn't stop it.  They said outside your window is a dead girl who died in a car accident.  She does not know she is dead.  We will call her here.  Here she is.  And this dead spirit flowed in the window and looked directly at me.  It was all wrong impossible and I knew it.  I asked the girls if I could take them home and they said yes.  I don't know where that was.  But when I got back the spirit was still visible in the window.  She was flowing around the room.  

So I just sat in the car until my parents returned and I told my mom. She practically marched into the house and into that room.  I watched the spirit flow out of the house and across the front yard.  I never saw those girls again.  My mom said she told that spirit she was dead and must move on.

Of course until now I've never told anyone this story.  I don't like to think about it.  Maybe then I was embarrassed. Or scared. 

heteroclite

Odd you know how someone can decide to steal your paintings isn't it?

What for...?  They can't resell them safely.  They just have to hold on to them for 25 years and even that isn't really safe not when they face a jail term of 10 years.

And in my case so much of it at least the earlier stuff is drawn by my sons.  And often the work is about my mother and father, original photographs, stories about my childhood, things that I'd hoped would be stories for my children to read...things to help with our communication...especially after I'm gone.

My youngest was saying yesterday...dad it is the job of policemen to make everybody happy isn't it?...I said yes it is...then he said good we'll get them back.

I guess they just keep building on the last one.  That's what it feels like but I don't really believe it.  It is something else something strange I guess.

"In a world like this one, it's difficult to devote oneself to art body and soul. To get published, to get exhibited, to get produced often requires ten or twenty years of patient, intense labor. I spent half my life at it! And how do you survive during all that time? Beg? Live off other people until you're successful? What a dog's life! I know something about that! You're always recognized too late. And today, it's no longer enough to have talent, originality, to write a good or beautiful book. One must be inspired! Not only touch the public but create one's own public. Otherwise, you're headed straight for suicide."  Henry Miller

Collage certainly

my qr...I should make paintings for each of my followers and put a qr on each one....


here are some collages...

I thought I might explain a wee bit how these things sometimes happen.  Mostly it is sort of all at once, but occasionally it is just piece by piece like getting juice out of a criotube...it goes so slowly.  Like once in a while I'll have one for weeks for god's sake and only one piece at-a-time-over-the-course-of-time will cooperate.  I hate those although my funniest one of all time was made that way.

You know how when you get Chinese food sometimes you secretly get a little bit worried about the fortune cookie.  I mean what if it's not a good fortune?  So I always get extras so I can pick the one I want  which was none of these by the way.

Chiaroscuro Cylinder Echolalia

I opened my eyes today so I could see around me.  And I noticed that many artists just put up their work without any comment.  whadayaknow.  So  I was thinking maybe I could do that too.  Sometime.

But while I paint I talk to my paintings (not really -I just try to pierce them with my gaze) and try to cajole them into becoming something great.  Or at least better than I can do.  That is usually all I can accomplish.

But it is much better when that other takes over and I think not at all.  Nor do I talk. Am not really there.  At all.

That's when interesting work gets done.  All I do is look at it.  And on rare occasions I think wow that is great.  I want to do lot's of those.  But then I have to ask how did I do that and then the whole process gets ruined.

So I just don't have the mind for it at all.  There is no room for analysis discussion etc.  Just do the next one and the next one and the next one.  Open up and let her in.  It is like a Caesar cypher, some recognizable yet obscured object, something you know when you touch it in the dark, yet when you wake up you can't see it anywhere.

It seems weird to me how I just keep painting the same thing over and over and over.  And then again.
But maybe someone else out there knows what I'm talking about.  Cause I don't.

Robert Motherwell said something about how artists are like math wizards who keep working on the same complicated problem.  And the only people they can share them with are other math wizards and they are very few.

But well uh.  They just keep comin. And I put a few of them up here on the blog.  I noticed I don't put up colllages.  Why's that?  I keep makin em.  Allright.  I'll put up a few.