the divine unrest

too many old fashion's tonight and my thoughts are distant and yet centered. over many drinks I once asked the painter Mark Zimmermann, "where are the heroic paintings?" An accusation directed at self more than an indictment on the "art/Art world" but no less so I suppose. Where indeed?

I walked into the studio today, the big black painting surface-dry, the smaller ones still wet to the touch. The time makes me think. The necessary pause, the Waiting in a Tom Petty reference makes one..or provides one the opportunity to ponder.

This stroke.

Line, form, drip, intent on surface. What is this? Affirmation, yes. Given. but and yet, humanity, something sacred long passed over. hand. human hand on surface. shamanism. the job of the artist is to bring it back; to go and to bring it back for the tribe (the willing) to experience. We live on the outskirts. you must seek us. this is not new or novel or modern. this is primal. art is primal. pigment. alchemy. life. god. spirituality. truth...if we're lucky.

we must paint. no rational. no over-arching idea, concept; conceptualism makes me want to take up arms and I have held them, fired them and I know, i want to take up arms. AK-47 in a Minnesota basement, but I've told you that story....now, now I bring bombs and those bombs are visual, some would say aesthetic. my work; I come by the sword. I live by the sword.

There is no rest for the artist. The Divine Unrest, as Martha Graham put it. Always anew, always an undiscovered country. We push because to stand still is to die. If there is anything worthwhile in my work, let it be that when people see it they step outside of themselves for a moment in time and perceive in a new way.

Tomorrow will begin with a pediatrician visit and a choreographer sleeping in our home. I will paint. I will lay it down and bring it. I will buy a ticket to NYC and I will stand a breath's distance from de Kooning and perhaps I will drink heroically with formidable painters and smoke a cigar on the water. It begins.