Storm Lifting

"Storm Lifting"

 oil on panel  7" x 9"

"What can you do with your days but work and hope

Let your dreams bind your work to your play

What can you do with each moment of your life

But love till you've loved it away

Love till you've loved it away."

Bob Franke

In the face of the news over the last few days, I thought this lyric from a song I first heard in the early 1970s might do us all some good. Art can't solve social problems, won't cure disease, can't make people treat each other decently in any direct sense. All it might do is to bring an individual to a stop and allow them to leave alone immediate problems or concerns and enter into a thinking, feeling, contemplative state of mind and perhaps find a pathway toward empathy or at least recognition of another's experience. A small goal perhaps, but whether an old folk song, a symphonic composition, a dance, or a small painting - perhaps it is one of our few remaining pathways to human connection. 

"There Is No Reason Not To Follow Your Heart"' Steve Jobs, Rainer Maria Rilke, the Outer Banks

"Morning Sandbars"

  oil on panel  20" x 24"

"Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. 

There is no reason not to follow your heart."

Steve Jobs

"What is required of us is that we love the difficult and learn to deal with it. In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us. Right in the difficult we must have our joys, our happiness, our dreams: there against the depth of this background, they stand out, there for the first time we see how beautiful they are.

from the Selected Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke

When making paintings one must approach the entire operation with willingness to take on whatever difficulties present themselves as pathways toward the visual idea or trigger; the ever elusive joyful poetry that started you. This willingness to attempt the difficult can be a valuable habit and an encouragement in itself - a kind of freedom grows out of it that makes following one's dream a daily involvement.

This painting grew out of a visit to the Outer Banks of North Carolina and a renting of an old house that had survived enough storms that it's front porch stood just feet away from the surf. A great chunk of my life has been spent by the beaches down there and have always loved the rhythm and presence of the sea. The hazy morning light was the poetry I was after; the structure of waves bathed with the peculiar light 

was my challenge. Hope you enjoy the result!

Downhill Stump; Beauty Walks A Razor's Edge: Bob Dylan, shi tao

Downhill Stump

 oil   8" x 10"

"Beauty walks a razors edge,

someday I'll make it mine."

Bob Dylan,  

from 'Shelter From The Storm'

"The ultimate aim of painting is not decorative beauty but truth. What is truth? It must not be confused with formal resemblance; indeed, formal resemblance only reaches for the appearance of things, whereas the function of truth is to capture their essence."

shi  tao

The difficulty in making paintings lies in the balance between 'thing' and form, subject and material. Each practitioner must discover a singular way to cut a path through the struggle, to give each of these forces its own weight and presence in the work. I've been allowing surface and viscous paint to rule over time, luxuriating in the thick paint and color. But value and structure sit on my shoulder reminding me to not forget them - while subjects hold a place as visual incidents and triggers and sources of seeing - 

the original source of the visual poetry.  

 For each painter this may well vary as one works through the repeated days of looking, seeing, working - constantly seeking that razor's edge of beauty and the truth it enfolds. This is the difficulty  - and the joy as well! 

"Wave Break", Fairfield Porter, Eliza Gilykson

"Wave Break"

  oil on panel  12" x 18"

Think I'll go down to the Sea for awhile,

Kick my shoes off in the sand.

Don't know what I'm gonna be for awhile,

Don't want to try to understand.

from 'Coast' by Eliza Gilykson

"As the wholeness of life eludes control, so the wholeness of art eludes the artist"

Fairfield Porter

All one can do is grasp for some kind of understanding, some kind of form, while engaging the swimming chaos of living. This is, humbly and fully aware of Porter's statement, how I make the attempt. Enjoy.

Winter Wood; A Magic Portal; Paul Cezanne;

Winter Wood

  oil on panel  8" x 10"

November Creek Bank

  oil on panel  11" x 14"

"Nature appears to be always the same, yet nothing we see endures. Our art must convey a glimmer of her endurance with the elements, the appearance of all her changes."

Paul Cezanne

Perhaps the sources of art are set out here according to Cezanne. How we deal with the impermanent chaos of the visual world - each one of us seeing in our own manner - in an effort to bring some kind of coherence or understanding back from the battle. If we have any success it is found in the contemplation of others, opening a brief portal to step through into a construct we discovered. Perhaps these works will provide something for you. Enjoy!

Pablo Neruda, Rilke, Winter Stream, Late Afternoon

Winter Stream, Late Afternoon

  oil on panel  8" x 10"

"All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are."

Pablo Neruda

"The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things."

Rainer Maria Rilke

Maybe its just one way of reading it, but Rilke seems to be pointing out a progression of greater and greater things that have not defeated one, in order to move on to the next. As I grow older and as I go to my painting each day I can understand well this under-lying meaning. This keeps me on Neruda's path, trying my best to convey what I am by what I see and love and attempt. Enjoy!

The Primordial Soup; Porter, Tolstoy; Junker Study 1

Junker Study 1

  oil on panel  10" x 10"

"I think it is a way of making the connection between yourself and everything."

Fairfield Porter

"A true work of art can in it's entirety  only represented by itself."

Leo Tolstoy

The way I would explain these ideas to my students was simply that each of us stand in a in a primordial soup made up of the atomic structure of all things. Out of this tangible sensory chaos an artist must try and glean some kind of form; some note of understanding things on a very non-naming, structural level. The best way to achieve Porter's connection to every thing is too erase one's self - to become one with the surroundings. This sounds like silly mumbo jumbo but it isn't - as soon as one learns to see the world without naming things and only in terms of the process of painting the visual chaos reveals patterns, color relationships, spatial connections.  This way as well, is the path to Tolstoy's true work of art - the painting having become its own reality, rather than an imitation of appearances. Enjoy!

Instruction In Joy and Acclamation, Mary Oliver, Spring Creek

Spring Creek

  oil on panel  10" x 10"

"It was what I was born for - 

to look, to listen,

to lose myself

inside this soft world - 

to instruct myself

over and over

in joy

and acclamation."

from the poem "Mindful"

by Mary Oliver

Sometimes, when someone asks me how long it takes to make a painting, I answer that it took 64 years - all my years so far in this world.  I'm not being flip and I understand that a non painter (read more normal person) wonders on such things because in industrial society work is divided into weeks and days and hours and value id assigned accordingly.

I am being quite serious with my answer because this has turned out to be what I was born for and everything in my life has in someway affected me and propelled me toward making the particular painting I am working on at the moment!

The other problem with answering such a question is that I cannot predict and in the end cannot know how long each one takes - because while I work I sort of disappear and become blissfully unaware of time. I can tell you that I am at this task every day, instructing myself over and over in "joy and acclamation." Another entry might deal with the assigned value - suffice for now to say each one I feel is a reflection of my soul.   Enjoy!

"The Collaboration", at the Swallows Falls, Western Maryland, Van Gogh, Degas,

Top Of The Falls

  oil on panel   9" x 12"

Bottom Of The Falls

  oil on panel   6" x 8"

"I am seeking. I am striving I am in it with all my heart.

Vincent van Gogh

"It is much better to draw what one has in one's memory. It is a transformation in which imagination collaborates with memory."

Edgar Degas

I learned a very valuable thing while getting these images started at the foot of this waterfall in Western Maryland; never sit for three hours on a boulder, in the shade. Even with a jacket beneath you. It took a couple of hours to thaw out from the chill! These were touched up or finished up in the studio but I feel retained the 'presence' of the place and day - and that is the danger, that you will make one touch too many and kill the spontaneity.  That is where Degas' collaboration comes in - once when someone asked me how this works I responded that I just dream myself back to the place and the day. They looked at me a bit askance after that but it is exactly what I do though I could not say how. 

Except that I am in it with all my heart. Enjoy!

Fastwater and Rocks, Robert Henri, Ranier Maria Rilke,

Fastwater and Rocks

  oil on panel  12" x 16"

" I know nothing better than being present and clear eyed when the miracle happens."

Robert Henri

"Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing.  Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude are everything."

Rainer Maria Rilke

Someone asked me how I could get the movement in the swirling water of a fast moving stream - how could one make paint do this? The only answer I know is to see with the closest possible care and to know how to see form, shape, space, value. But then one must use memory and understanding and imagination as well. Forty years of using oil paint allows a certain freedom as well and it is vital to trust one's drawing. 

There are times when I am so immersed in the process that I'm is not entirely sure of how it came about.   I think that immersion is what Henri refers to as 'being present,' and perhaps 

Rilke's 'porous ego' is the ultimate state of awareness, in this case, of what that water is actually doing. Enjoy!. 

Once More The Fleeting Sensation, Marcel Proust, Ranier Maria Rilke, paintings as offerings, Bear's Den

Winter Rocks at Bear's Den

  oil on panel  11" x 14"

Early December at Bear's Den

  oil on panel  11" x 14"

"I ask my mind to make one further effort, to bring back once more the fleeting sensation."

Marcel Proust

"What is required of us is that we love the difficult and learn to deal with it. In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us. Right in the difficult we must have our joys, our happiness, our dreams; there against the depth of this background, they stand out, there for the first time we see how beautiful they are."

Selected Letters of Ranier Maria Rilke

As not for a long time, the present depth of despair over the news from Paris can be overwhelming and at the same time a cause for zeroing in on what we hold dear. As Rilke writes, it is at these times our joys and dreams stand out in stark contrast and we see how beautiful they are. The arts can be a refuge at times but it seems to me this time we must use them as a banner of shared humanity against ignorance and selfish, empty dogma. 

Here I offer two paintings from a favorite place, high on a ridge in the Blue Ridge territory, west of our home. It is a place of huge boulders and forests and the Appalachian Trail. It is here I can ask my mind, caught in the whirlwind of events, 

"to bring back once more the fleeting sensation." 

Early Autumn Woods What is beauty, Terrance Hayes, Franz Kafka

Early Autumn Woods

  oil on panel   8" x 10"

"Yes, I have a pretty good idea what beauty is. 

It survives alright. It aches like an open book.

It makes it difficult to live."

Terrance Hayes

 Autumn Streambank

  oil on panel   8" x 10"

What the best art tries to do is take the familiar and restore it a kind of strangeness, a kind of newness - to allow us to see them as never before. Perhaps a good definition of beauty is something that takes us unaware and unexpected - yet calls us to stop and exit our everydayness and simply contemplate.  

These two subjects are not two miles from our place - a location I have been to several times but on a given day, at a particular time, parts of this familiar landscape come to life as a new and fascinating subject. It is always a mystery to me and perhaps it needs to remain as such. 

"Be still and quite solitary.

The world will offer itself to you

to be unmasked. It has no choice.

It will roll in ecstasy at your feet."

Franz Kafka