returns

Slow night but courageous; painting into the safe, destroying to build, allowing the paint to lead the way without judgement...or perhaps against it.  Bright, big moon cloaked in deep prussian blue black clouds of night like the sky reflecting on the ocean far away from the shore.  It is the creator's prerogative to obliterate and flood and burn away; even the beautiful.

The full studio is a dangerous place.  Work must struggle against the tyranny of aesthetic and its reassurances.  Each new picture is an autonomous entity, rightfully so; heir to its own being and presence.

Unexpected breeze blows through the studio, carrying Miles and echoing the horns against the brick and wood and floating along with cigar smoke into the rafters and visual memory for another night when the hot wet thick air returns.  August is coming.

Sometimes the artist must struggle in order to forget what s/he knows; about life, about love, and art.  Forget and play.  Forget and make marks against the comfortable and the known.  Forging out into the icy sea to feel one's course through the walls of frozen oblivion-makers, like skyscrapers in the city.

Smoke and sky.  Slow burn of dried leaf curls and rises as do thoughts subdued by action, repetition and waiting.  The paint bleeds and blends and pools and now it dries a mile away in the darkness; white and breathing and vulnerable and naked.

Charcoal-stained fingers from page after page of exploring line.  Line, form, weight, gesture; fundamentals of the practice that serve to ground and to humble and to connect eye to hand, circumventing thought and mind.

It's good to be back.