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

A Battle of Opposites, "Earth Your Dancing Place", May Swenson, A Celebration and A Holding Onto

November Stump

  oil on panel  8" x 10"

"Take the earth for your own large room

and the floor of the earth

carpeted with sunlight

and hung round with silver wind

for your dancing place."

May Swenson

from her poem,  "Earth Your Dancing Place"

Down Hill Stump

  oil on panel  8" x 10"

I cannot say exactly why, but when in doubt of my work or perhaps just when looking for a new path, I return to the woods, to the images of these rotting stumps. Beside the idea that they are central to a cycle of life that continues with no concern or awareness of us, these old stumps offer me much more. They are color and posture and gesture and allow me a precarious place between abstract expression and solid reality. This balancing place is the territory in which I feel I must plant my work's flag - and which can so easily elude me. All I know is this;  I will celebrate the physical stuff paintings are made of  - while I cannot completely let go of where they come from - 

this battle of opposites that fills up my waking days. 

Stump and Rock

  oil on panel  10" x 8"

"Train your hands

as birds to be

brooding or nimble

Move your body

as the horses

sweeping on slender hooves

over crag and prairie

with fleeing manes

and aloofness in their limbs"

also by May Swenson

from "Earth Your Dancing Place"

A Leap of Faith, Attempt What Is Not Certain, Richard Diebenkorn, Fastwater #2

Fast Water #2

  oil on panel  6" x 8"

from 'notes to myself on beginning a painting'

"Attempt what is not certain.

Certainty may or may not come later.

It may then be a valuable delusion."

Richard Diebenkorn

These notes point to a man whose working method is a large part a kind of solving a puzzling labyrinth. The best impetus I have found for getting a painting going, regardless of style or subject, is to embrace the idea of plunging into uncertainty. This does not require throwing over composition or color or any other important skill or approach - instead a willingness to avoid making the same paintings over and over. The most difficult task in painting is ti ignore the safety of similarities and push toward change. I used to tell students that it was the same as jumping off the high dive and trusting there will be water in the pool - a leap of faith.- that is what Diebenkorn was after to get a work started. Perhaps his 'valuable delusion' was simply a way to get out of the labyrinth. Enjoy!

Fast Water #1

  oil on panel   6"x 8"

Seeing With The Heart, Autumn, Loudoun County. de Saint-Exupery, 'In order to make art,...

Autumn, Loudoun County #3

  oil on panel   8" x 10"  

"And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: it is only with the heart 

that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

It seems to me that this line from "The Little Prince", r elates to the state of mind one must enter into when painting - a kind of faith that what one feels before a subject is most important. Of course, seeing with the heart requires one to be immersed in the sensory experience of the place in order to feed the heart or spirit. A necessary freedom from the 'things' before the painter coupled with an abandoning of concern for finished product are both necessary.   This all reminds  me of a saying - 'In order to make art one must have the mind of a scientist, the openness of a child, and the the heart of an explorer.' 

Enjoy!   Feel free to leave a comment or an observation.

Two Lake Studies; A magician and a physicist; Pablo Neruda, Claude Monet, Paul Cezanne

Maine Lake 5

 oil on panel  8" x 10"

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

Pablo Neruda

Maine Lake 2

 oil on panel  8" x 10"

"Genius is the ability to renew one's emotions in daily experience."

Paul Cezanne

"For me, a landscape does not exist in it's own right, 

since it's appearance changes at any moment."

Claude Monet

These are two studies done on the shore of Orange Lake near Whiting Maine, 

during the last week of September - just got around to photographing them. 

I am convinced that painting from the landscape, while being a humbling struggle before elements that never remain constant and are a continual struggle, elevates the painter to the level of a magician and a nuclear physicist. After all, one is compressing time while juggling light and space and form. This is the stuff of Einstein as well as Monet and Cezanne - and could only be attempted with the searching process of the poet such as Neruda. Enjoy!