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.