When I Close My Eyes I See The River

Usually when I close my eyes I see the river. These days it’s my little stretch of the Broad River … not the ferocious swelled beast, churned up brown water with whitecaps. Not that one. I see lazy green puddles among huge black boulders — the one I can wade across if I’m wearing the right boots. Lately I walk out into the middle of a shallow patch and stand there. Just stand there. Something about it — standing in the mud, with the water flowing around me, just like I’m one of the rocks. The River — take me to Church.

But there are times I don’t see the river: when starting a new painting … while it’s just beginning to take shape in my mind. For significant pieces, I work in studio-imagination for quite a while, and finally take it to the canvas only when the destination is fixed. I’ve been visiting the unformed “Window” for a couple of years now … with the lovely figure seated on the floor in front of an open window … bright light beaming in and casting darkly informed shadows around her lanky frame.

The sun came out yesterday, and I had to do it. I just HAD TO DO IT. Here’s the first day’s work. I already love her.

Love in Shadow

I had planned to work on research this week, to advance what I consider my last research project. But about a third of the country is frozen today, so I decided to get back to the studio for the day. Not really painting … just working on a few of the paintings in the pipeline …. one in particular: a figurative piece of one of my favorite models. Josie. The working title is Window … but as the composition evolves … I’m starting to think of it in terms of activating (and elevating) the shadows. So … working on the composition … photoshop and paper sketches. The idea I was trying to articulate was: don’t forget to look in the shadows!

And then I looked up from my drawing desk and saw this.

Hmmm ... Maybe

2021 is all in, and I’m still dragging some traps from 2020. But not the burdensome sort Thoreau cautioned about … those that would nip us in a vital part. Instead, these pieces and parts of the year are going into a curry … one with lots of flavors and heat. I’m trying to survey the work I did last year, tie it all together, and expand it into a meaningful whole.

I hesitate to say so in these painful times, but I am at peace … which is weird, right? The world is awash in fear, and anger, and danger. I know it’s there, and I feel tremendous loss … believe me, the sun doesn’t set on a day without at least one good cry. But those tears are for the pain of others, not for me.

For me, these are threshold times. We entered the worm hole with one set of realities. And we will emerge from it with another. I know that idea is at the heart of what the 20-21 body of work will express … not the world before, or the world after …. it will be the world of the threshold itself … the experience of what we lost from the past, and what we are finding for the future.

Working on pieces for a show later this year. This will not be my first solo show, but it will be the first of this type — a body of work unified around a relevant theme.

And a name! A name! I know more or less what this curry will taste like, but what will we call it…. Hmmmm….

A Mystical Covid Christmas with My Friend Named Boss

The year 2020 gave us so many shifts in reality, not the least of which was Christmas. Like many families, mine did not gather together. The loss of our rituals was unsettling, but we created some new ones to fill the void. Oddly enough, I made a new friend for the season. And he kept me company in the studio as I painted gifts for his children.

Here’s the story. The commission came in during the second week of December. It was a fairly unusual request, but I’ve had weirder. The client brought a portfolio of photos of her late husband, and wanted two portraits (using the same source photo) — one painting for each of their daughters. I’ve painted deceased subjects before, working from photos without ever meeting the person. Generally, working from photos is fine … but not meeting the subject is a real challenge. As I explained to the client, every brush stroke is a decision …. moving the painting toward or away from the “feeling” of the subject. If the artist has no real sense the person to orient the work, it’s like wandering toward a destination deep in the woods without a compass. Lacking a well of experience to draw from, it all comes down to instinct …. and faith. I have no shortage of either, but even so, it’s VERY hard to do this kind of work well.

Having finished my other Christmas commissions, I accepted the assignment, and hastily prepped two 16 x 16 boards with portrait-grade linen over panel. While the canvases dried, I tried to discover more about this larger than life character everyone lovingly called Boss. His wife told me stories; so did the man who had served as his driver for many years. The source photo was one Boss had liked, in a dark, conservative suit. We decided to paint different ties for each painting, using ones with meaning for each of the girls, and corresponding background colors … one red with a school tie, and one blue with a whimsical, tropical tie.

Then the work began … two easels side-by-side in the upstairs studio where it’s so warm and cozy in the winter (I’m not sure I’ve ever loved a studio space more). My source photo of Boss was on a music stand in the middle …. always looking right at me, with tender gray-blue eyes …. and something else … something ineffable … growing in strength as the work progressed. I’ll come back to that.

When painting a portrait using the classical method …. building the picture up with thin layers of paint … the image emerges gradually. The underpainting, which is essentially a monochromatic drawing in paint, generally resembles the sitter, but rarely conveys the feeling of the person. In a way, that feeling comes together gradually, layer by layer. But for every single portrait I’ve ever done, there is a precise moment when the subject feels real. It’s not sort-of-real, then a-little-bit-more real, then more-real-still. Nope. The process of construction is gradual. But that moment of life happens in an instant. I always feel it, tingling on the back of my neck. Not a conscious thought … it’s a feeling. From that point on, there’s a negotiation of sorts … the person seems to respond to every mark … “yep, keep going” or “no, not so much”. The subject essentially tells me how I’m doing. Of course they do … at this stage they are alive, metaphorically.

That part … the moment of life … is normal for me. Moving along the process alone, then suddenly the person is there with me, and we carry on together. To be clear, I feel the vitality of the person, but I don’t feel their literal presence in the room. We are co-creating, but my studio-reality is not the same space as the subject’s painting-reality. They feel real, but they don’t feel present. That was always true, until Boss.

From the moment I placed his photo on the stand, he felt alive to me. Neck tingles from looking at the photo! Granted, portrait painters get a lot of information from looking at a person (or an image) … a lot more data than someone without an artist’s eye. (As a kid everyone thought I was psychic because I could always tell when people were lying … turns out, it wasn’t anything supernatural at all … I was just a portrait painter in the making.) But deriving gobs of information about a person from their image doesn’t make them feel present.

OK, you know the feeling of a presence in the room, right? Unlike solitude, there is the energy of shared space … even if you’re not interacting … you can feel another person in the space with you. Normally that’s because they actually ARE there with you. As I worked on these two portraits … softly at first, but growing in intensity … Boss was there in the studio. Bear in mind, doing two classical portraits in a week is no small task for me, so I was working every waking minute. The fatigue and pressure were enormous. Without the necessary drying time between sessions, I was painting wet into wet, which is an unforgiving technique. “A siege in the room.” The self-doubt is always there to battle; this time I was feeling it in my body … clenched jaw and aching shoulders. But my friend Boss always settled me down. His presence, and yes, it did feel like a presence, urged me on … “you can do this — you can — you can do this for my family.”

The client and I communicated about the work every day. Unlike many artists, I love collaboration, so her input was welcome and helpful. And as the feeling of Boss grew in me … as his presence felt more and more real, I finally broke down and mentioned it to her. I didn’t want to sound TOO crazy-from-the-world-of-weird (which is actually where I live, but try not to talk about it, since appearing sane strikes me as a useful professional characteristic). I toned down the experience: “ya know, I’m getting a feeling for him … I can almost feel his presence,” apologizing for sounding a wee bit psycho. Amazingly, it didn’t sound crazy to her at all. She told me stories of the many times since his death that people close to him had had the same experience…. “there was a recent wedding where everyone kept saying to me, ‘I can feel Boss here with us.’” At that point I was all in. If Boss was determined to help me, I was going to listen. And we worked on together.

I basically collapsed into bed late Christmas Eve thinking the two Bosses were finished, but someone woke me before dawn — “do a bit more”. So we did.

I delivered the Bosses to the client at 4:00 on Christmas day, and she gave them to the girls that evening. They were completely surprised, and thrilled with the work. Normally, presenting a portrait is a nervous business … never quite sure how the client will react. But this time was different. I wasn’t wondering how they would feel. I already knew — we had gotten it right, my dear friend Boss and me.

Coburg Sign

This is a commission for my dear friend Joni — a Christmas surprise for her husband. Happily they love it! And, hate to admit it, but I do too. Funny thing …. I thought about the design for months. Knew I wanted it to tower over the landscape, with a larger than life feeling. At first I played around with all sorts of clutter, telling the Coburg story in little pieces and parts that would mean a lot to the family. But hard as I tried, that never worked. So I consulted some masters of monumental painting … Bo Bartlett, Ben Long, Diego Rivera, Grant Wood … a few of my personal favorites. Simplicity was the guiding approach. The whole point of a symbol is to say a whole lot … but without a whole lot of fanfare.

Twenty Seven Red Pearls

For all of 2019 I had planned to return to the Santa Knows tradition, this time with a She-Santa instead of a He-Santa. There were quite a few subjects in consideration as the year passed, but the sad loss of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg made the choice easy. And what a fine subject … like most people of greatness, her story is written on her face. The decision to use all that delicate lace was an easy one too …. such a rich symbol for her life and her work. Now, in the immediate aftermath of the Capitol siege, it seems that lace has turned out to be an even more fitting symbol than ever imagined. As recent history shows us, democracy, like fine lace, is fragile. It takes a long, long time — with a steady hand — to design and construct. And it takes relatively no time at all — with a dark and sinister heart — to rip apart.

Responsibility Is Purpose

As a fairly isolated person … living in a tiny village far from family and friends, and working alone … this past year has had some dark nights. That’s certainly true for countless people all over the planet.

The existential darkness is a particular burden for artists. Why am I doing this? Do these careful lines and swirls of paint really matter? Sometimes even beauty feels pointless. Rationalizations like “art benefits its culture,” and “you produce a product which benefits the economy,” and “people like your work,” and “you should be using your God-given talent” …. none of these abstractions soothe the soul on those dark nights.

Sometimes you just have to get through it organically, to wait it out. One of my mentors, Michael Kampen-O’Riley used to observe that when I go into a dark hole for a couple of days, I come out of it and do my best work. And as I think back across this year, I realize he may be on to something. Somewhere in the darkness we find purpose, and climb out of it with fresh eyes. The only truly useful beliefs are the ones that are tested … the ones that require you to hold on to them even in the darkness.

Paintings usually mean something to the people who commission them. I remember a story about my dear friends Ann and Peter, for whom I’ve done several portraits. Ann told me something once that changed my life. Funny, because I think it was just a passing comment for her. She is amazing that way — always hiding magical ideas in the most ordinary words. Anyway, she told me that when they evacuated their beautiful Folly Beach home for hurricanes, the only things they would take from the house were my paintings. When I asked her why, she said, “Because they are us … they are part of the family … the part that lives on.”

A commission is a responsibility. Instead of pointless swirls of paint, the portrait holds the potential to be the part that lives on. If I do my job well, it will be. And in that responsibility lies purpose. The kind of purpose that pulls us out of the dark night, back into the studio, back into that place of beauty and hope.

Working on Hannah and Phoebe. Just want to do my job well.

Peter Korb

R. U. O. K.

I live in rural America. Almost all the people in my life live in cities.

There really is a difference. It’s easy to frame that difference in terms of politics. That’s easy and convenient. It is also wrong. Very wrong.

I stopped along the road between Rock Hill and York South Carolina. You should know this about living in the country: if a car is stopped on the side of the road, the driver needs assistance. Period. They can be male, female, old, young, black, purple, green, yellow or white. If a car pulls over, the driver needs assistance. Period. And everybody stops. Even me …and I know NOTHING about cars. But I stop and say what everyone says: Are You OK?

As an artist, I often pull over to take a photograph .. a landscape, some horses, a guy with a cross …. if I see something beautiful, I want to capture it .. remember it …. save it forever. Maybe I will paint it, and maybe I won’t. But I want to save that image for later … I want to drink it …. taste it … feel it … AGAIN. So I pulled over to take a picture of this guy … walking down the street with a wooden cross. I’ve seen him before, many times actually. And so on this morning, I pulled over to take a photo of him.

And of course. Someone immediately stoped and asksed “are you ok?” I used my customary dismissal: “I am from the city.” That usually sends them on their way.

But not today. If I had said, “mama is very sick and I was crying so much I couldn’t see” I know I would have ended up in someone’s kitchen eating tomato sandwiches and drinking home brew. So I said, “I’m okay.”

He smiled at me and said, “next time, why don’t you stop and talk with him. He is smart and interesting. You should hear what he has to say.”

And I will do that. Stay tuned.

The Only Rational Act

Lots of work these days, complete with deadlines and even (Oh Yeah!) compensation. More than ever, I’m cultivating the flow state — the zone — that state of consciousness which allows us to leave the bulky harness of the here-and-now, and move into unity with the work itself. In this space, for me at least, solutions flow into the process seemingly without any effort on my part. In fact, from this magical place, I am my most rational … my most productive … my most creative. Time vanishes. The dots connect themselves. The output is peak performance. And the input is … what?

The only word that seems to fit is love. When I pour creative attention into a project, I feel love for the inputs — the process — the outputs — and the outcomes. This is not that clingy, anxious sort of love … like a relationship gone wrong. It is the exact opposite. I’m sure you’ve been there … in sports or work or play … everything in the world makes perfect sense … it is so easy — like knowing without learning.

With so much work to do, seems best not to leave this “in-the-zone” business to chance. One researcher determined that there are three conditions required to enter and maintain the flow state:

• clear goals

• immediate feedback

• optimum skill-to-challenge ratio (He postulates that 4% is best — meaning that the challenge level is just slightly beyond our perceived competence, thus the pull of the just-out-of-reach goal keeps us in the zone.)

This is the perfect storm of portrait painting: a known objective, a process that always tells you where you are, and the drive of an ever-haunting fear … “all those other times were just a fluke … you’ll never be able to do that again … what were you thinking … is it too late to get a real job!”

One time in Asheville I was hanging around with some artist friends, and James, who was forever on the hunt, was trying to attach himself to a lovely woman clustered with her tribe at the other end of the bar. His usual pickup line, “I am an artist,” didn’t seem to be moving this clearly very bright woman. She came back with, “ok … but are you a serious artist?” His response was pretty good: “If you go out with me, I promise I will never paint your dog.” Most artists I know, the good ones at least, have an internal line in the sand. For me, until now, that contemporary-potrait-painter-line has been on the SERIOUS side of this: little girl on a porch swing with kittens and flowers … under no circumstances would I go there … to the Hallmark movie of portraits. So naturally, that’s exactly what I’m painting right now. And here’s the scary part — it was my idea, not the client’s.

The background flowers for “Hanna and Phoebe” are pink azaleas. From memory of course, I’ve been rendering highly stylized mounds of Italian yellow ochre-bohemian green earth-sap green-permanent green leaves, neutral gray n2-brown pink bark, and permanent rose-brilliant yellow extra pale flowers. Cerulean blue specks of sky peeking through. To me, the work feels like that sweet azalea sigh southerners know so well … wandering around every spring enjoying the fresh, home-grown reds, and lilacs, and yellows. and mandarins, and pinks, and whites. And there’s the little thrill of spotting a favorite variety … like Golden Retriever owners giddy from stumbling across other people’s Goldens.

As I’ve written so many times in this blog, I love the work … every bit of it …. even the hunger. Only now something is different — I’m feeling less conflicted about it. My inner Don Quixote’s sanity is defined by the love codified within the quest itself.

Given the outcomes and the alternatives, to love is the ONLY rational act.

The Place Where There is Nothing to Explain

It takes time to build a masterpiece. Or does it?

There is the time to conceive of, design, and paint it. There are the thousands and thousands of hours of learning to draw and paint … dreadfully at first … then slowly feeling the hand and the eye and the spirit working together … then light dawning on the truth of it all as mastery approaches … and finally …. finally knowing that you can paint anything … the monetary bliss of that, followed by the dark burden of “now what?”

When completely lost in painting, there is no time. In fact, there is no anything. There is a dreamlike sea of color and shape and story and emotion — when the soul expresses itself. I think this is called unity consciousness, at least that’s what I call it. If you’ve ever been in this zone, you know that if there is any time at all, it is experienced in a vastly different way … as plastic and observable. It is not concerned with the habituated reality of a clock-time-march …. it is ours to ride wherever we want … like children on bicycles.

Aside from the commissions I’m just starting, there are only two unfinished paintings in my life — Garden and the Dendera Study. The latter is part of the (yikes!) Unseen Architecture work. It is based on the Dendera Zodiac ceiling bas-relief from the chapel dedicated to Osiris in the Hathor temple at Dendera, an ancient timepiece.

All that’s left to do on Dendera Study is detail the hands of the large figure, and sign it. Have absolutely no idea why I have never bothered to finish it over these dozen or so years …. but today is the day. Like the celestial calendar from who-knows-how-long ago, maybe the little painting and I have cycled back to the proper place to make these last few marks. We have finally crossed an ocean to a place where there is nothing to explain. It sure took us a long time to get here … or did it?

Going Native

Over the years I’ve bought dilapidated houses in what are described generously as transitional neighborhoods … first in Charlote then St. Augustine, and now in my beloved little village, Lockhart. In all cases I have ultimately contributed to change in the neighborhoods, but more than that, the neighborhoods have changed me. No question about it … I always go native.

In St. Augustine I bought a large house, once grand, built by Flagler’s railroad guy. From what I learned, the original owner was a leader in the emerging Black middle class Flagler created with his investment in the town. When I bought the crack house on Oneida Street, it had no windows, holes in the floors, no wiring, but remarkably, one working bathroom. In any other community this house would have been raised. But not in St. Augustine … gotta love that! So I camped in the house while I restored it. My neighbors, most Black, considered me to be the craziest white woman on the planet. They worried about me …. no kitchen, no electricity (at first), no air conditioning. Every evening a child would show up with a foil covered paper plate …. my supper.

The Johnsons were my closest neighbors … Larry and Dotty, their four daughters, and five grandchildren. (I painted all of them.) And as certainly as my supper would arrive at 6:00, Larry (below) would show up in the morning and start working on the house with me. He rarely said anything, just started working. Finally I began paying him. Eventually, he became my best friend. He would explain the world to me in ways I would have never even imagined.

Now, in my little village of Lockhart, population 621, I’ve gone native again. I’m one of two college educated people living here … the other is a writer, Chic, a close friend since 7th grade. Interestingly, Chic has never integrated into the town … after ten years, he barely knows anyone here. Conversely, after two years I’m a “local”, proudly the town’s “very own artist”.

Yesterday evening I sat outside for a few minutes, safe distancing, with a couple of neighbors and listened to their stories … of childhood in the then-thriving mill town, of family, of cheating spouses, of crazy pranks, and, yes …. of politics. I heard, “I didn’t go to college like you, and I understand that … you are from a different world … but let me tell you how I feel and why …” I love these neighbors of mine, and they love me. By the end of the evening I had traded a painting for a tiny baby kitten. If you’ve never gone native, you should try it … you will never be the same.

Like many people, I worry about my country on this 4th of July. But with only a very few exceptions, I don’t worry about her native sons and daughters. Our differences are not real. We want the same things. We just don’t know how to listen to each other.

Awash in Butterflies

Have made some progress on Garden, and ready to spend the day of Eve’s butterfly dress … and then butterflies, maybe ghostly shadows, moving heavenward. Still working out the details on all that. Here we go. Happy Independence Day!

Sins of the Past

It seems like our global pain and reconciliation has come home to roost personally, in my life and in the lives of the those I love. Maybe that’s because our inner and the outer lives house essentially the same energy … at least that’s what I believe.

Relitigating old pain … some of it ancient pain … offers the benefit of exposure … of acknowledging and re-experiencing the pain. That’s the conventional approach. And I guess there’s a role for that since most people are comfortable with their conventional patterns of thought. But “all boundaries are conventions waiting to be transcended.” One of my most important teachers, Janet Sussman always says,

“There are two ways to take out the trash: we can look at it while we take it out, or we can not look at it. Either way, we have to take out the trash.”

Language has power and direction, like a vector. Content comes from one place and moves in the direction of the subsequent place, and along the way, ideas and feelings are conveyed. I know it’s semantics, but experiencing old problems and trying to work them out, doesn’t sound very efficient or fun to me. I think the words we choose, in large part, are the thoughts we choose. And the words we chose along the process of rebuilding with a new reality, just like the colors we choose for a painting, define the ultimate destination.

This painting is the first real piece of art I purchased. It’s by Jim Byrne. When I saw it at an opening, I was spellbound. And for months after that, seemed like every time I closed my eyes, it drifted into view. So finally I tracked it down. It was delivered to me in Charlotte, crated like a piece of furniture. As it hung over the fireplace, I gazed at it for hours … just drank it in … and walked myself through the step-by-step process of creating such an emotionally charged object. I would picture the canvas underlayer, and how the paint was built up … how did it feel to hold the brush … what did the very first brush stroke look like … where was it … and why did Jim start there. And how about second brush stroke….

After about three months of that, I became a painter. When my birthday rolled around, I ask for art supplies, which baffled everyone since I’d never painted before. The first thing I attempted was a portrait, and it turned out to be a pretty good one. No one was more surprised than I.

I don’t understand the process that started in me, sparked and fed by this painting, Hammock. But I know art has the power to do magic. And the process of visualizing the final picture long before you get there is where the magic happens. It changes our language/thought patterns to experience the beauty as it emerges … not lingering on the muddy, disorganized footsteps along the way. Taking out the trash without looking at it.

Billie's Meyer Lemons

This weekend we will celebrate four Father’s Days and two Birthdays. Up until a couple of years ago when she moved out of her house, my mother Billie had several amazing Meyer lemon trees. She’d keep them outside all summer, and the bring them indoors for the winters. If you’ve never had a Meyer lemon, please try them … plump and juicy and almost sweet … one of my favorites. This little birthday painting was done from a photograph of Mom’s last lemon harvest. I remember taking the picture in those strange days as she was packing up the house … and downsizing. I can’t remember who got the lemon trees … family and friends. The glass bowl belonged to Mother’s grandmother, and then her mother, and then to her … always filled with fruit. I’ve always loved the way the glass spheres around the rim of the bowl reflected the fruit …. like little fruit-filled-marbles. This little picture, 10 inches square, is headed for Mom’s apartment kitchen in Charlotte. The painterly style is highly energetic … and seems to work well for the subject, even on such a small canvas. Sure hope all that thick paint will be dry enough by Saturday!

So with this done … and a couple of other small pieces to wrap up today … I can move on to the four commissions …. Little girl with Cat, Man with Dog, Sign with Cow, and Dog. Whey!

Dragon vs Wetiko 2

Finally decided to put the finishing touches on this little piece. At the very end of a painting … and in the final moments, we bring out the …. wait for it …. wax. Williamsburg makes the best of course. My classical technique uses thin, semi-transparent layers of color, so blasting those final highlights with opaque lead white mixed with just a trace of nickel yellow (a cool yellow) brings the picture to life … and when the back of my neck tingles, the thing is done.

Wetiko is turning out to be more than I imagined. But change is sometimes ugly on the surface. Underneath, well … best to hold a vision of future the we want. Like staying true to the vision of a finished painting … even when things look muddy … it is the dream of the ultimate reality that pulls me along to the picture I want to see …. and the world we want to share. Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.

So tonight I’ll enjoy my private painting-done ritual. Nice dinner, candles, flowers, and an interesting book. Life is good.

Color and Beauty and Craft

Over the past couple of days, as the country burns … with understandable anger among the oppressed, and rapturous anger among the divisive …. there’s been no painting. It’s not that I’ve been feasting on the crisis … I’ve actually tried to avoid the news …. tending to the lawn, digging in the dirt, cultivating black-eyed Susans, loofahs, and vegetables to climb all over the fence, further separating StudioKitchen from the world with a living border wall …. oddly, fantasizing about how to make the four-foot enclosure even higher. I love my little village, I really do …. there’s no reason to shut it out. I just don’t want to live in this version of my country right now. I want to make my own country: population 1 artist, 1 golden retriever, and 3 cats.

Like everybody probably, I feel the pressure of darkness around me, and I know that if I don’t get back to the studio it will take me down. Color and beauty and craft will restore me the way they always do. So I’m back to work on this little painting. Purple tulips, white poppies, and a Chinese dragon should be just the ticket. If history can be counted on, I’ll go to bed this evening thinking it’s finished … then wake up at 2:00 am to “hit it again”. If the world weren’t burning, this would be a perfect day.

A Country Once Forested

Eleven years ago I had just begun to explore, through study and art, a theme that has preoccupied me since childhood — the convergence of science and spirituality. Here’s where I think it started:

When I was eight years old, and suffering a family trauma, I withdrew deep into myself. Hiding in a secret compartment under the attic stairs, I would pray. My prayers were answered by someone I called “the Doctor”. When I told my sister about him, she said these dangerous stories were going to land me in a home for crazy children, where they would “lock me up and throw away the key!” … so it became my biggest lifelong secret. But during those troubled times, I visited the Doctor often, and was always calmed. He would explain what was going on with my family in terms of science and math. He never, ever mentioned the Bible … so in my eight-year-old brain he couldn’t possibly be God … and quite reasonably, I called him the Doctor, like Doctor Albert Einstein.

The Unseen Architecture phase was my attempt to access the underlying fabric of the universe … to articulate something I had always felt, but could never grasp in a material way. Since I was driving everybody nuts with these unfathomable paintings, I wrote a little booklet tying the art to ideas … calling on great writers and scientists and poets and artists to help me tell the story.

When I woke up this morning to the news of cities on fire, this current atmosphere of hate and division made me wonder where my country has gone …. how it has come to be so lost to me. I tried to imagine a way back from this ‘Country Once Forested’. One page of the Unseen Architecture booklet reminded me how timeless and universal this struggle is in humanity — the struggle to remember who we are, and not go back to sleep.

The image on the page below is a bit hard to read, so here’s the poem by Wendell Berry:

In a Country Once Forested

The young woodland remembers

The old, a dreamer dreaming

of an old holy book,

an old set of instructions,

and the soil under the grass

is dreaming of a young forest,

and under the pavement

the soil is dreaming of grass.

Better than it Has to Be

A couple of weeks ago I got a call from a friend in Charleston, a member of the Coburg Dairy family, who wants a funky, cool painting of …. wait for it …. the Coburg Dairy sign! The original is for her, and then we are going to make prints for family members. The sign is iconic in the area, and although it’s changed over the years, most Charlestonians …. at least those who have been on the scene for a while …. consider it a treasured landmark … sort of like the statues of pigs adorning Piggly Wiggly owner Buzzy Newton’s Battery home.

As I settle in this evening, reviewing the photos she sent, I’m getting more and more excited. This will be too much fun … eventually. But right now I’m swimming in a sea of compositional elements and perspectives and palettes and scale and abstraction and yak yak yak. This is the time of unmoulded potential, the unconditioned about to take form …. known as the Fool in the Tarot deck. Pure potential is uncomfortable in a way because it’s just a bunch of ideas buzzing around with no organizing construct. But in that moment when the unifying idea emerges …. it feels like magic …. better than it has to be.

Christmas Morning in StudioKitchen

So so so excited to have received my new shipment of art tools and materials. With all the upcoming work, my rag-tag assortment of brushes and paints simply had to be replenished, so I bit the bullet, as they say. I don’t even want to tell you how many hundreds of dollars have just been unpacked. People really have no idea how much good art tools cost …. just like any other endeavor, I guess. But as Ben Long used to say, '‘you’ve got enough to overcome as an artist without having to work with inferior tools.”

Nineteen brushes … all filberts (that’s really all I use now) …. these are the smaller sizes 0 to 10 because (given my technique) the big brushes last vastly longer than the smaller ones. Robert Simmons Sapphire for finish work, Windsor & Newton Monarch for that time between the underpainting and the delicate top glaze layers, and Princeton Dakota, a new brush for me, with long firm bristles and a sharp edge … want to test drive these for outlining, on the rare occasions I do that.

And Williamsburg paints. My uncontested favorite. I remember Ben always hated them because they can be unpredictable …. which is precisely why they are perfect! Riding the wild horse.

Here’s a no-accidents-in-art story about Williamsburg Paints. My friend Bucko Brandt advised me on several occasions to connect with a friend of his, a well respected Charlotte Art Czar named Larry Elder. I tried to connect, but Larry had just sold his gallery, and I wasn’t finding an easy path to him. Some time later I stumbled into him at a gallery in South End … in fact, someone I didn’t even know said, “I think you should meet Larry Elder, and took me upstairs to his office.” I told him about my connection to Buck, a little about my art pedigree, and showed him some work. He closed the office door and offered me some cookies. “Let’s talk a little bit.” (They were really good Christmas cookies … I think his wife made them and he didn’t want to eat too many so he brought them to the office to share.)

Somehow I mentioned Williamsburg paint … I have no idea why because it’s not something that would normally come up. So it turns out … here we go … the company had been founded by a New York artist named Carl Plansky. Great painter. After his death in 2009 the entire collection of his work went to one dealer — Larry Elder. When asked if I knew Carl, I said no but I love his work. Larry smiled … “come here.” Outside the office … up and down several halls were all of Plansky’s paintings. I was spellbound. Still am, actually …. it was Larry’s guidance that led me to my new gallery situation … not the traditional business model … rather a design center filled with all sorts of creatives … and art.

So for this Christmas morning in May, it’s only Williamsburg paints for me … in gratitude.

The Siege in the Room

With the new Charlotte gallery opening in August, I’m reeling with a sort of edgy electricity — four paintings underway, three new commissions to start, and a multi-layered research project — one which will require, because of the times, complete openness to new realities. I’m feeling what Samuel Beckett referred to, when embarking on a period of intense creativity in his life, as “the siege in the room.” Sitting with the blank canvas for “Hanna” and working out details of the composition since very early this morning, I’m trying my best to get lost in one project at a time, while keeping the others organized and airborne.

Honestly, I truly love these times of barely controlled creative fever … riding the wild horse … a time to, as my father always challenged me, see what I’m made of. Never has a life of rural isolation served me better and I’m so thankful for that: the reclamation of StudioKitchen, while not finished, has settled into a comfortable place; the garden is in; my loved ones are safe; there’s food in the pantry; recently re-stocked studio supplies; and probably enough money to keep the lights on …. hell, this summer I’ll even have the luxury of air conditioning …. so here we go!

I’m ready to lose time for a while (an antisocial work schedule untethered to the clock or calendar) … actually, that’s already happened. There was a time I worried about such weird work habits and rituals, but not anymore. All that matters in the end is the work. We were put here to create, and I have finally digested the red pill — success has absolutely nothing to do with validation, or security, or conformity, or anything else on the material plane — to create is simply why we are here. And as scary as it is for us to trust, doing what we are here to do is all the sustenance we need, and then some. Samadhi, as Buddha said … “when you realize how perfect everything is you will tilt your head back and laugh at the sky.”

A while back I found a book about the work habits of artists, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work. An easy read, it’s REALLY interesting, and it also makes me feel better about living an unconventional life among mostly conventional people. In fact, reading about other creatives’ daily lives and peculiar relationships makes me feel almost normal.

… About painting while listening to a book or television … I’m in good company. Chuck Close:

Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. [He likes to have the TV or radio on in the room.] I like a certain amount of distraction. It keeps me from being anxious. It keeps things a bit more arm’s length.

… About the angstie start of a new project, Joyce Carol Oats:

Getting the first draft done is like pushing a peanut with your nose across a very dirty floor.

… About the overwhelming compulsion to get back to the studio, Ernest Hemingway:

You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again. When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty and filling, as when you have made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through.