Hush Hush

 As an artist I am always searching for my spiritually covert language, the closed conversation between my soul and the Divine.

A sacred braid, we weave around and within each other, a linguistic hide and seek, building a wordless language through color, shape and structure. 

The seeker becomes the sought.

And like an arcane chameleon / me and my Maker / we evolve, we mutate, we grow.

It is impossible to be immutable. Until the final molecule of oxygen escapes from my lips back into the Universe, where I will slowly dissolve, fading to stardust. 

A rainbow / a glimmer / a sudden burst of brilliance.

Hush Hush

Stardust

 

Selfie

I marvel at the stamina and resilience of my body, my feet and my legs.  They have been faithfully carrying my increasing height and weight until my mid-twenties where I balanced upon my set point on six and half shoe size feet.

A joyous toast to you marvelous feet and marvelous legs, torso upright, arms swinging to music only I can hear, hands creating, well-shaped shoulders supporting neck and the regent, the head. 

Time to travel inward where the unseen land of miracles performs night and day to a full house, without pause. The exquisitely extraordinary ballet of life; stomach, the uncontested conductor, sending signals through the dynamic vagus nerve to the brain which then orchestrates everyone into positions of optimum production, pumping red glory, all keeping the miracle of me alive!

I fill the corrugated-consciousness, complex maze of my mind with libraries of gratitude / happiness / health / kindness / patience / generosity. A symphony of electrical adjectives that shimmies my heart into gladness.

I feed you / food for thought / food for health / food for pleasure / formal exercise / sexual exercise / dancing / lifting / stretching / breathing / touching / feeling / on soaring wings of abundance / all critical for the river of blood to flow freely in an infinite loop of nourishment / a marvel beyond words / an ecstasy beyond landed experience.

I am the embodiment of stardust streaming / I am the embodiment of stardust dreaming. 

Breaking Rules

 Diffusion 5

“There are no rules…go against the rules or ignore the rules.” Helen Frankenthaler

The above could have easily been expressed by Frankenthaler’s contemporary, Joan Mitchell. With a major difference in linguistic delivery. Mitchell would have simply said, “Fuck the rules.”

 Known for her contempt of any ideology that would straight jacket her sensibilities and freedom to live and paint on her own terms, she did not allow society to dictate her way of moving through this life.

 To find a new way of thinking, seeing, doing, you must be able to break the chain of acceptable behavior. Some posit you must know the rules before you can break them. Logical and yet, sometimes the rules are so entrenched into the psyche of the collective, that once you know them you almost fear to break them.

 The most dogmatic rules are fed to us, in tiny spoonfuls, by our earliest teachings from our parents and then our schools. Upbringing and religion provide tightly bound traditions that offer safety and succor if you stay between the boundaries of “acceptable” behavior. Dare go outside these social boxes and you risk being cast out and ostracized.

 After watching the horrendous, slow motion murder of George Floyd on national media, reminiscent of the blood sport spectacles in an ancient Rome arena, difficult to watch, yet just as hard to look away, many Americans and citizens around the world, woke up to the horror of acceptable discrimination and racism. Over the course of days, weeks, and months, a lava hot, slow-moving realization; prejudice was intrinsic to our behavior.

 Yet, I argue, not in our hearts. We are not born with prejudice; we are taught to be prejudiced through the language and the actions of our parents and other early influences. Then as we grow, these false beliefs shape our view of the world and we begin to mirror the micro society we are part of – our tribe.

 These behaviors are so subconsciously embedded in our psyche, that even when we meet “the other” it is difficult to see beyond the color of their skin. On the surface we behave with a certain decorum, but just beneath the veneer of civility, there are the whispers coming from the lips of our reptilian brain that bind us to those early influences.

 Similar to Morgana’s spell on Merlin, which kept him locked in the dark caverns of his ego, it takes tectonic events to break these familial and societal chains for the scales of discrimination to fall from our eyes and crack open our hearts. Suddenly these childhood rules shatter as we awake from the bardo and are reborn to see all people as people, and realize all religions are from the same tree; diverse branches lifting their arms towards the magnificence of the Universe.

Like fabled Humpty Dumpty, once cracked and shattered, the rules can never be put back together again.

 There is no glue that will erase the cracks of knowing, the wizard is revealed as a paper tiger. We are now free to “fuck the rules”. Humanity wins. We win.

What Is The Story?

 There is something I have been struggling with for years, why must an artist, to be taken “seriously”, produce a recognizable body of work? Recognizable in the manner when people see your art in a gallery, in print, on social media, they immediately attribute it to you.

Gallerists, other artists, and colleagues advise consistency as a way to brand you as the artist. 

When I look at the body of work I have made over the past fourteen years, at the beginning, I was all over the place. A result of taking a lot of workshops and copying the style of the instructor. Quite normal, I am told.

Once I realized I had to go beyond the instructors and their techniques to develop my own style (and frankly, I don’t want my work to look like another artists), I still found that I took pleasure in the experimentation phase of painting. What if is a part of my internal dialogue. Over the past few years, I have been working in a more disciplined manner, and can see a consistency of my hand on the canvas.

Then in the late fall of 2018 I re-discovered my love of collage and began developing a series that has no resemblance to my paintings or mixed media work.

 

The Black-Tie Affair

Analog Collage

22.5 x 14 inches

 While musing on this one early morning, it struck me; I am a writer as well as a painter. My collages are an extension of my writing, a form of visual storytelling told in paper images instead of words.

 What lights me up about collage is the ability to create fantasies, dual realities, puzzles for the mind.  

 What is the story of The Black-Tie Affair? Is it about loss? Mystery? Regret? Or simply a man’s remembrance of an exquisite moment in his life?

I am not here to tell you the ending. I am here to show you the beginning. The rest is up to you.

 

My Awareness is a Silhouette Floating in the Background

acrylic painting on Birch board

12 x 12 inches

My painting are also a form of visual storytelling told with pigment and paint. Here I strive to create worlds of calm, beauty and elegance. An oasis for the mind where you can lose yourself for a while, tuck the troubles of the world away and just dream.

My purpose as a non-objective painter is to create a visual landscape from the inside-out. The painting is my story and your story simultaneously. My version, your version, the true version.

 The End

 

A Puppy and His Unique Taste Buds Leads the Author on a Thoughtful Journey

Our puppy, Nigel, discovered a weird and to a human, disgusting appetizer, wild goose poop. Before I could stop him, he had ingested several green droppings, which he discovered on our mid-day walk past the man-made pond in our neighborhood.

The next day, at exactly 2:48 am, he barked me awake from a very warm and cozy sleep, with an urgent, I have to go out..NOW.

 We have councils of wild geese that land in droves by the pond, where they graze and bath as if visiting a posh spa. Before lifting off to warmer climates, they create a landmine of a mess and a tempting buffet for the neighborhood dogs.

I don’t fault the geese or the dogs, they both have a stake in the land. As do the coyotes and foxes that can prey on the smaller dogs, if they are not tethered to their two-legged companions.

 We too, have a stake in the land. But our vision is stilted and narrow minded. We see the land as a tool to further our ambitions. We believe the land is here for us, for our taking, to do as we please.

 The American Indians thought the white invaders devil-crazy when they approached them to “buy their land”.

 The land belongs to no man. The land belongs to the land. It would be as crazy as offering to buy the sky; above, below, it’s all free to be.

 Only it’s not. Look where we are. We have lost our relationship with the land, smothered her with concrete, burdened her with buildings, some Babylon tower tall, stripped her bare and clothed her with tracts of housing, shopping malls, airports, cities and roads. Molten tar and soul crushing concrete to shape and map sinewy highways across this land and lands throughout.

Our eyes yearn for those pristine areas of majesty and our ears cry for their holy silence. When we see a photo, we are stunned by her beauty and wish to be transported, not to tame but to be held in her thrall, to honor, witness, and explore her wild wilderness.

So, when I see a coyote, or a fox, or a hawk flying high in the sky, I feel blessed to witness their wildness and I feel a measure of sadness as we continue to encroach on their stake in the land and force them into smaller and smaller spaces of survival. And I always make sure I know exactly where my four-legged companion is.