It is mid-October

The problem is that people almost always prefer what I was doing a few years earlier -this has always been true.  The other problem is that so do I...!  Discovering things is clumsy and sporadic...and the results don't at first compare well with the glossy and lauded works of the past.  You have to keep reminding yourself that they went through that as well, otherwise they become frighteningly accomplished.

That's another problem with being made to think about your own past...you forget its genesis and start to feel useless awe toward your earlier self...How did I do it?...Wherever did these ideas come from?

Now the workaday everyday now, always looks less glamorous than the rose-tinted then -except for the magic man-hours when your finger is right on the pulse -and those times only occur when you've abandoned the lifeline of your past. -Brian Eno

Whatever there be of progress in life comes not through adaption but through daring, through obeying the blind urge. -Henry Miller

And even then you may get zero nothing a tame kitten.  To find the source seems the most difficult the most oddly occurring nameless event.  And even then it has no identity no face, and you cannot remember it, you cannot recall the process.

And when you get lost you wonder why am I doing this?  Who is this for?  it just seems crazy yet not wild no it just lays there and looks up at you there is always some monstrous face in it and it asks who are you? and what do you suppose will happen?

"They told me" Willard says to Kurtz at the end of a long journey up the river "that you had gone completely insane and that you methods are unsound."

His baldness bathed in gold his body pooled in shadow, Kurtz murmurs: "Are my methods unsound...?" -apocalypse now

painting what is there

I'm a painter and my whole balance is not having to think about things.  So all I think about is painting. It's the instinct for the the placement where all that happens.  I don't have to think about it...so I don't think about composition...I don't think of color here and there...All I can think of is the rush. -cy twombley

All my life, my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name. -Andre Breton

I was just a broken head...I stole the world that others punctured...Now I stumble through the garbage...Slide and tumble...Slide and stumble -Brian Eno

get rid of meaning.

your mind is a nightmare

that has been eating you:

now eat your mind. -kathy acker

It's not uncommon for artists to fall short of their own expectations, only for the public to find delight in the charged gap between  the aspiration and the goal.

whilst I was painting

We converse as we live by repeating, by combining and recombining a few elements over and over again, just as nature does when of elementary particles it builds a world. -William Gass

Whilst I am painting -a deux mains- my brain sorta just spins and I oft turn on my brain-thought bit which usually just spins on a nice idle cycle, yet when I am painting it sorta turns on fast an starts spinning around very fast what with the junk one thinks about when not thinking.

I like to engage the thinking an give it some juice an it can sometimes come up with something but sometimes I don't get the thinking part, like I don't push the button in all the way in and so my brain is spinning fast no juice.  And it fries out.

It's a bummer.  Feels like I'm I don know maybe like 12 or something.  Takes forever to fix it let me tell ya.  The spinning tears off all the outer cleverness and sophistication an it gets caught by some stupid visual clue an it tears the whole layer of smartness type stuff.  Then next you lose all manners and forget the most elemental of social nicety.  Often You've gotta take it out and get it rebuilt before it can work again.

That is the best time for painting though.

It's funny though cause when I'm done painting I often feel like a savage like some werewolf that's been out ravaging the countryside...and when I get back I can't remember what I did.  And when I look all I see are three or four stupid little paintings.  They are so tame.  Nothing else has changed at all.

I wish painting itself had a great story to tell a sort of mirable dictu ...but it doesn't seem to nowadays.  It  seems more like some mad experiment carried out high up in a ruined castle, one that almost always fails and leaves only the jottings of an absent-minded twelve year old in his notebook.

Only in dreams, in poetry, in play do we sometimes arrive at what we were before we were this thing that, who knows, we are. -Julio Cortazar

To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is only the end of life.   -Robert Louis Stevenson

the angel is my watermark

I didn't mean to have her in here I don't think...but I look and there she is the focus of the painting.  How are you my beauty?...I'm glad to see you.  It appears you are here to wish me good luck and to bring happiness...and you are made of a candy wrapper...!

I read yesterday where Marc Rothko said -My paintings are not me, they are not-me.  I found that strange.  I've always found them so deep so profound...but if it is true what he says, then what a miracle that he could create them...

Mine are always me...the expression is always me.  One will be so sharp and clear, the next mushy and combed with what seem like paste.  I look at it the very next day and I think, I wanted to achieve that and I did.  But I don't remember how.   

Some of them I love and they seem unruly and undisciplined...yet I have not the heart to discipline them, I accept them just as they are.

And others appear as an ocean of peace for me, in both their yellows and their greens.

No matter what I do...they all just get done.  Some months from now, If I were to look once again at them I would probably only remember one or two...

And soon it will be Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas once more.   It all tumbles over itself, each holiday arguing with each other to be the happiest, the most memorable, the one one with the special sparkle.

What a crazy time it is.  The leaves are beginning to change color, the wind is blowing and -believe it or not, the yellow stripes in the center of the road have slipped and slid over two feet each.  Now one side of the road is wider than the other.

dirty and greasy

These all seem a bit dirty and greasy to me.  Sort of like a recently abandoned factory.  Maybe I'm remembering Detroit where I lived for eleven years.  Not that it was dirty or greasy.  It wasn't.  It was really quite a magnificent experience.  The most lovely and beautiful people.

But it had abandoned factories and abandoned streets even then.  And of course it had many many old American cars driving around.  And at that time I collected rust.   

And these old cars often dropped small pieces of rust.  I mean often enough so that when I would be walking I could find one or two.  My favorites were two little pieces connected together that actually moved.  Those were cool.  And I like metal so old and rusted it was like lace.

I'd bring these home and add them to my pretty substantial collection.   I only hope that now there is some rust collector who still has access to it.  I no longer can find any at all.

I do believe these remind me of the rust I collected.  The rust and the wet sewers on the street and in parking lots.  All the detritus you could see everywhere.

Don't you know, my blue bubble friend in this future of yours, as you work on the art project you will be working on then, maybe detritus is a word you may use as you describe this era.  Maybe this attempt to collect and preserve this abundance of waste is at the center of it.

And there is some kind of attempt to document my own wasteful life.  A la TS Eliot I think...We are the hollow men headpiece full of straw...

Of course someone is right now documenting their life hopefully in the same way.  But with writing.  That would be fun to read.  -walked 26 steps to the door of Blick Art supply.  10 min. in store.  Bought ink.  Got back in car.  Drove 1.7 miles home...

Sounds like Alain Robbe-Grillet don't it a little.  Of course he is sadly gone.  Ah, maybe it is some new kid I don't know yet.  Where does he live my blue bubble friend?