Commissioned Portrait: “A New Perspective”
A collector of my work commissioned me to paint a portrait of him in my style. I don't do a lot of portraiture so I enlisted Violet's help and we worked together on this painting. She is more adept at creating from real life than I am. In that way, we tend to meet in the middle as my approach generally builds up from abstraction.
The person who commissioned the painting is quite a thinker, parsing different ideas and concepts through his mind in a really brilliant manner. The resulting piece is intended to portray the lens of the mind contemplating a flower and the various ideas and associations around that- colors, shapes, etc. He loves the blues in my work and had requested that I stay within that spectrum, so it was a good piece to paint in tandem with "Only Love Can (Reign Over Me)".
Only Love Can (Reign Over Me)
I began this painting in September 2017. The blues and clear focus felt like a good next step following The Apotheosis of Hope. But then the fires hit all around us (we live a couple hours north of San Francisco) and our air was awash in smoke, the light was ever orange-gold, and everything was chaotic and burning. Suddenly cool blue didn't seem so important even if it felt trite to say so.
At the time, too, we'd taken in some cats that our [terrible] neighbors abandoned when they moved. One of those cats, Mu, who Violet had rather fallen in love with, was seized by our neighbor's dog and killed. It was brutal. This would be, in and of itself, rather tragic, but she had already been suffering from depression. There had been a lot of loss in her life recently and it'd been building, draining, challenging. The death of this sweet new kitty sort of rocked the boat in a serious way she tumbled even deeper.
A Transitive Nightfall of Diamonds
"Each note is like a whole universe. And each silence.... And the quality of sound and the degree of emotional... It's like the most important thing in the world. It's truly cosmic."
Jerry Garcia in "The Rolling Stone Interviews"
Loud fuzzy distorted sustained amplified strummed plucked looped shredded wah wah wah wailing upon and fed back through layer upon layer of chord progression melody line guiding me and dividing me and finding that perfect note, that golden chord, that crying out tone of my soul.
The Apotheosis of Hope
“Hope springs eternal in the human breast;
Alexander Pope
Man never Is, but always To be blest.
The soul, uneasy, and confin'd from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.”
Hope.
When the Smoke Cleared
So the past couple of weeks at our home in the Northern California have been challenging. We moved an hour north of Napa back in December and, after the wettest winter on record, we had the hottest (and driest) summer on record which led to the worst fires, you guessed it, on record.
Our air was thick with smoke and we woke every morning examining the current fire maps. We were rather surrounded - to the north, south, and west at times less than ten miles from the brunt of them. When everything is like a tinderbox and winds may shift at any moment, that ten miles doesn't seem so far. Some friends transported all of our artwork to Oakland for safekeeping - 'just in case. Our bags remained packed next to the cat carriers by the front door.
It Is a Good Time To Make Art
"I recalled the artists who had done their work in gulags, prison cells, hospital beds; who did their work while hounded, exiled, reviled, pilloried. And those who were executed...
This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.
What Painting Is
I wake up because the cat is mrowing because he's hungry and I slept fifteen minutes later than I usually sleep and he's come over to my side of the bed imploring me to please get up now because he is HUNGRY but I'd like to sleep even though I know I am going to get up because morning and painting. I pull myself up while Violet stays sleeping. The sun is up though not broken over the hill yet so it's still early which is good. When I do the math, it means X number of hours til noon which is the general cut off time to go do other things even though I always think that I could get up earlier. If I wanted to. If I was enough. So I get up. Dressed. Tell the Fi - I'm coming. I'm coming. I open the blinds in the living room. I pull out his bowl. My mind, sometimes feeling defeated early in the morning, too many loose ends and threads that I don't understand, people to call or emails to send but ultimately, for now, just looking for the thread to the brush.... I make tea. I feed the cat. I carry my tea downstairs to my studio. Then I go back and get the Fi because he's old and has a hard time navigating the stairs. I sit in my chair, drinking tea, staring at my painting finding the thread - where I left off - the place I pick up again - and the part of me that wants to stand there for another 4 or 5 hours knowing there's tired feet and a tired tailbone waiting for me. I drink tea. Eventually, the moment is right and I stand. I put some paint on my palette. I pick up the brush. I poke. I prod. I shade. Eventually, along the way, I wake up. Mind and heart scream and yell or whimper or plead or whisper entreaties of all the things I can do or be. Mind and heart - they just do what they do on and on and on. But, eventually, somewhere along the way, I hit that note. I strike that chord. And it's all going and flowing and golden again, like it has always been. It's that dance again that I know so well and love so much and am honored and humbled to explore every day and will do it over and over and over again oh my god I love painting so much. And when I walk away from that easel, I am again.
The Value of Art
Art: it's this visual record of who we are, how we imagine ourselves, where we're going, where we've come from. It's the visual record of out psychological states - as a human organism. If you were to take all the varied pieces of art from all the different art movements in some brief span of time, you'd find a wide spectrum of emotions, perspectives, and inspirations. Yet, it all came from the same place - this Earth - and happened at the same time.
The things we consider valuable on this planet - the things which have attained a greater sense of value than, say, food or water - are valued simply because they are perceived to have valuable. For instance, a gold bar is perceived to have a certain value. One gold bar can be melted down and turned into another. Cast it as a sculpture by Dali and it now has a greater perceived value. It has been turned into Art. It is that expression which creates new value.
There Is No Place for Hate Here
My public face is reasonably apolitical. I intend for my art and writing to inspire a brighter, more beautiful, and more hopeful world. I do my best, most times, to let it just be that. I think that there's so much in the way of politics already that I don't feel a need to bombard you with more. Afterall, as they say - if you aren't outraged already, then you aren't paying attention. And it's never been my intention to outrage you all the more.
But here's the thing: in recent days, the beast of racism, of sexism, of xenophobia has reared its head in this country in ways that I thought unimaginable. And it is all in the name of economics and politics. Those things ultimately - on their own, are not political. To call them "political" is to do a disservice to the humans who are affected by these attitudes every day. They are issues of hate and division and fear. While those are the tools of politics, they are not politics not in and of themselves.
The Sword of Laughter
"What matters is to move surely and calmly, with the appropriate humor and appropriate melancholy in the temporal and spatial landscape that we are."
Michael Krogerus - "The Decision Book"
One of the things I can thank my mother for (and there's many things) is instilling in me a healthily strong sense of humor. Dinner time in my house for the family of five would often see my dad recounting something he'd heard on Paul Harvey, a radio talk show host, while driving home from work. I'd remark on something I thought funny - some increasingly sarcastic off-hand comment. My mom would respond with a leveling up of the funny. Then I'd respond. And so on and we'd bat it back and forth like some kind of ping pong resulting in humorous guffaws and, much to my dad's chagrin, whatever he had to say was lost to the peals of our laughter but at least the dinner table was happy and smiling and, ultimately, maybe that's all that mattered.