the miles

Bronzed and freck-faced girls bowled me over at the doorstep, and home is where they are.  Home and hearth; indeed a form of wealth in this oft-impoverished world.  Heading back into the studio tomorrow night, renewed and strangely free; as though there is no longer pressure; as though there is only open road.

Chelsea days and nights and thankfully no dawns this time out.  Minor misbehaving and nothing more. We marched across lower Manhattan and dozens of galleries, seeing the good, the bad and the inexplicable.  At times one wondered why some works hung under the glow against white walls; and so many white walls there are.  Mad shots and heroism of a sort.  The kind men in twilight years tell tales of to the women who suffer them.  The amazing work as well.  The work that seeps into the soul and gives it light.  More familiar faces each time I go, as I slowly begin to grasp that I, too, am becoming a familiar face to some.

Tomorrow night a cigar and the thickening night air and train whistles, and paint.  Alone and peopling my solitude with memory and exploration and experience.  The evening, the brick walls and wood floor and jazz floating and mingling with my smoke and my visions, twirling and winding back on itself into the rafters.  I've no thought of the future, only the nowness of surface and purpose.

ramblings on process and death

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and there are the nights where I'd rather go to bed at 8:30 than drag myself to the studio.  then I go; and more often than not there is some reward.  it may be fleeting.  it may only end in frustration, but the time's never wasted.

the rigors of painting, this thing I call my practice,  arise out of action and release; call and response.  tonight - a formidable image, and then, just as easily it was gone.  the painting is fragile and the thing can crumble before the artist's eyes.  weeks, months, even years, then..gone.  I love that every decision negates certain future options, and equally, that each mark provides opportunity for another -often unexpected mark.

so one works through it.  perhaps a vista, or prayer, or experience emerges and then before you is the reason for all the doubt and hours spent alone attempting to bring and to listen and see.

for me, my process has blind periods where I must wait.  working wet I have allow drying and allow the paint to explore and overflow and retreat.  I come in the next day to see what moves have been made; sometimes only to look and sit and stand and walk around and listen.  I have come to understand the power of waiting, of being acted upon...of surrender.

one of my freshly-turned seven year olds just informed me this afternoon that 7 is almost 8.  to which my mind answered, "and 8 is almost 18...and 28...and so it goes."  mortality.

I raised a glass to Dad last night, who would have been 73 yesterday.  he knew me as many things, but he never knew me as a father, and I suppose that makes me feel feelings I generally keep to myself.  Too long gone, and every year I understand better how very young I was to have lost him.  and then I see that what I say to my daughters is true; that I will always be with them.

my period of depression and doubt seems to be subsiding.  work comes from working, not thinking about it or indulging the ego's whims of fancy and insecurity.  painters paint; end of slump.  we pick up and endure and push beyond.  this odd and wonderful humanity.

and so it goes.

reflections on madness

Reflections on madness; what it means, relevance.  I'm questioning my relevance as a painter.  Then, with the imposed cultural template of Boston...context.  Explosions.  Is this what it takes to awaken the Sleeper?  Sadness.  Why do we look at fire and smoke?  Think about it.  Primordial instincts/aesthetics.

Is madness the inability to discern?  Is one aware of the decent?  Maybe, it's evolutionary.  Process and by degrees.  Or, is it at once?  Is madness blindness?  Or is it the condition which sees all at once and cannot subdivide into parts?  Abandon is not madness.  Ecstasy is not madness.  What of peopling my solitude and personalizing my overwhelmed sense of crowds?   I love New York for the alone-ness I feel; and its profound connection.

Am I worth my salt?  I'm alone and adrift here.  In less than two weeks I'll be booming Manhattan; hanging with others of my ilk.  Here; now; alone and madness.

Pretty?  Violent?  Spiritual?  I see pointlessness and failure, but I am close and in it.  Do I have the chops?  I still feel I can take it further.  I feel I must.  I reject the beautiful out of hat.  (what a phrase!)  I reject the pretty out of conscience

I fear only two things:  lack of freewill and mediocrity.

My day job makes these fears acute.  I am going insane painfully and slowly.

I'm drawing again in my head.  Big black paper with lines.  I see.  I am seeing.  Take that, motherfuckers.

I've seen death half a dozen times.  Show me something new and meaningful.  Let me see.  In seeing there is freedom; liberation.

Madness.