Even Cowgirls Get The Blues

"It's the people who have been deformed by society that I feel sorry for.  We can live with nature's experiments, and if they aren't too vile, turn them to our advantage.  But social deformity is sneaky and invisible; it makes people into monsters--or mice." 62

"Is love space? Or is love something we use to fill space?  If time eats the doughnut, does love eat the hole?" 93

"Certainly that sputterless little candeflame of the mediocre mind known as "common sense" has never produced anything worth celebrating." 123

"Don't be outraged, be outrageous!" 173

"It's like my life is sparkling in every direction, through all of space and all of time." 178

"There are many things worth living for, there are a few things worth dying for, but there is nothing worth killing for." 197

"In times of widespread chaos and confusion, it has been the duty of more advanced human beings--artists, scientists, clowns and philosophers--to create order.  In times such as ours, however, when there is too much order, too much management, too much programming and control, it becomes the duty of superior men and women to fling their favorite monkey wrenches into the machinery." 201

"A truly stable system expects the unexpected, is prepared to be disrupted, waits to be transformed." 208

"Only cretins and logicians don't contradict themselves.  And in their consistency, they contradict life." 224

"If you take any activity, any art, any discipline, any skill, take it and push it as far as it will go, push it beyond where it has ever been before, push it to the wildest edge of edges, then you force it into the realm of magic...illuminate its relationship with all other things...to that point of cosmic impact where it becomes all other things." 241

"The people who see miracles are the people who look for miracles." 254

"For the person courageous enough to seek it out, disorientation always leads to love." 296

"Whatever goes wrong can be used to your advantage, provided it goes wrong enough." 308

"Love easily confuses us because it is always in flux between illusion and substance, between memory and wish, between contentment and need." 330

"Maybe the human animal has contributed really nothing to the universe but kissing and comedy--but by God that's plenty." 340

"Playfulness ceases to serve a serious purpose when it takes itself too seriously." 343

"Yes...everything is getting worse.  But everything is also getting better." 350

"Our brains are forever having fun with us by making us learn over and over what we've known from the beginning." 352

Trenton Ave Arts Festival

Ran into some local, beautiful, repeated-line-ish things this Saturday--a day of amoebas, which feeds in very much with some recent pondering on the primal purpose (or lack thereof) of pattern and decoration, and with a certain Tom Robbins book introduction.

First, Elizabeth Nentwig:

Then, The 50/50 Company (named so because they make and sell only 50 of each print, and unfortunately these are the best quality photos I can find of the work). 

Exciting Wilmington Things!

A 5500 square foot sailing mural, soon to be the largest in Wilmington! Making a dream of mine come true in the most amazing way!  Check it out, if you can see it, here, and like our page and follow our progress:

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Kalmar-Nyckel-Mural/122633837927442?fref=ts

It is a more than beautiful thing to be enjoying life this much!

To Whoever's Out There: Hello and Thanks!

This blog has officially hit the 5000-page-view mark!

...something which prompted me to do some serious reflecting on exactly what I am doing here.  

When I started blogging in 2009, I used this space to keep track of research for my senior thesis.  I titled it, one could say rather immodestly, The Universal Story: A Painted Investigation of Figures Within Their Surroundings, Based on Daoism and Native American Philosophy, although the more I think about the act of story-telling--whether in visual, audio, or written form--it seems to be one of the most powerful tools we have to connect with one another while becoming irrevocably our own unique selves: one of the things that makes us human--universal indeed.  Practically, blogging was also a handy and at the time trendy way to connect with other undergrads in my program who were documenting their research in a similar way.

When I left school, most of the time I'd once spent looking at art and thinking about epistemology of necessity changed to time I spent planning lessons and thinking about how to catch my years-behind high school students up to their more affluent peers.  At the end of each day, the part of me that was crushed by this new burden wanted nothing more than to escape into a world inside a book, and escape I did.  But I noticed that I read so fast I often left myself with a color, a feeling, an impressionist painting of what I'd read, and the details, the words which I could take with me, sort of flew out a mental window.  So I very sporadically started writing some of them down here.

And now, when I find myself with more time (though never enough) to reflect and think and paint and draw and write, I've come back (full circle? ellipse? amoeba?) to something like the original purpose of this project--all the while coming to terms with the fact that I am not only a compulsive share-er (of all these thoughts and quotations and images and ideas) but also a compulsive stat-checker (of this blog).  It's been really moving to see my words reaching both places I'd expect--like the US and Costa Rica, or in the case of posts about Australia or Azerbaijan, spikes in those respective countries--and places that are a surprise to me--like Reunion and Borneo.

It's strange and beautiful, I think, that I don't know exactly where this project is going, nor do I know exactly who it's going to.  And yet, it's such a primal, crucial thing to share those things that grow inside us--really, that's all we have and all we're here for.  So I'll do the only thing I can, which is to take a half-step back and see where all this leads.

Here are a few words from the introduction of Bird by Bird, a book on the act of writing, by Anne Lamott, which seem to fit quite nicely here:

"[Writing] provides you with some sort of primal verification: you are in print, therefore you exist.  Who knows what this urge is all about, to appear somewhere outside yourself, instead of feeling stuck inside your muddled and stroboscopic mind, peering out like a little undersea animal." xiv

"[I] knew what it was like to have someone speak for me, to close a book with a sense of both triumph and relief, one lonely isolated social animal finally making contact." xix

"I started writing sophomoric articles for the college paper.  Luckily, I was a sophomore." xxi

"Do it every day for a while...Do it as you would do scales on the piano.  Do it by prearrangement with yourself.  Do it as a debt of honor.  And make a commitment to finishing things." xxii

"It's like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony.  The act of writing turns out to be its own reward." xxvi

"It is work and play together." xxix


And, should you feel so inclined, I'd be more than happy to read your comments or stories.  (...seems only fair, a little quid pro quo, after all this time :) )

My Place

This is a story about the power of story--how one family unveils (sometimes painfully, sometimes comically) its own generations-hidden history and comes together in the most beautiful way.  It centers around Australian Aboriginal culture, which after my research into Dreamtime and my roommate's recent return from that very place, seems more than coincidence (although I think I've stopped believing in coincidence and starting believing in co-incidence).

It's also about the power of place--something I've been thinking about very much as I've come back to live in the region, if not the exact area, where I feel more or less native; as I've been contemplating the seasonal cycle which has imperceptibly become a part of my own rhythm as I've grown older--or perhaps shaped that rhythm; as I've made my home more transient than ever before yet at the same time more rooted in this soil, literally and figuratively; as I've experienced what I can best describe as an ever-so-slight sort of culture shock every time I transition between Wilmadelphia and Philmington.

And it's also got a strong-woman-strand woven throughout.  The men are typically either absent from the narrative or absent from the family, with few exceptions.  It makes me, in light of many could-be-seen-as disappointments with the concept of harmonizing my life with a counterpart of the male variety, realize that while I still want that kind of partnership, a life intertwined with some awesome women would do quite a bit to fill up the ever-expanding vastness that is my heart.

It was especially interesting to read this after Tom Robbins' densely packed, metaphor-ridden prose (which I found out is written sentence by sentence with little or no revision, a process that takes about a day per page).  Here, the individual sentence structure and metaphor were second, by far, to the very act of storytelling.  So my selection of quotes is a bit thinner, but nonetheless worth a ponder.  I don't have page numbers on me; I'm in one home and the book's in another.  Here goes:

"You never heard anything special unless you were very quiet."

"Let me pass this way but once and do what good I can.  I shall not pass this way again.  Maybe someone else is walking a road that's like mine."

"Our lives fell into a pattern." (I've been thinking so much about pattern lately--culture and meaning and pleasure and ornamentation all wound up together into something like making sense of why we're here)

"Someone's got to tell, otherwise things will stay the same."

"One day, the place would be desert, the next day, green and gold everywhere."  In the context of the book, referring literally to the landscape, but also seems to reflect the natural ebbs and flows of the thinking-person's life, the cranial landscape if you will.  Or even if you won't...

"In my heart, I heard it."  The only place we can really, truly hear anything, I'd say.

Can You Camus?

About a month ago, I borrowed Camus' L'Etranger (The Stranger, en francais) from my friend's bookshelf.

Hadn't read anything of substance in French since my high school stint with Lord of the Rings (finally a method to make it last longer than a week)--but it was funny how fast it all came back.  

And funny how what I am mainly left with when reading in a different language is a much more...well... impressionistic impression.  While LOTR was full of darkness--obscurite, ombres, nuages, etc--L'Etranger was just the opposite--full of blinding light, blinding sun, blinding heat, all of which sharply offset the dark, tragic events--a heady contrast like a photo through too strong a filter, distorting reality.  I felt like I had to squint while I was reading, like I was an aveugle myself--but maybe that's Camus' point--that there is no way to see an un-distorted truth.

At least, that's the best I could understand it.  Maybe someday I'll read it en anglais and test out my hypothesis.

Some Speer-it!

Discovered Ken Speer in the house of some beautiful human beings.  Couldn't take my eyes off his mandalas, or the incredible world within chard seeds.  Interesting parallels there...  Plus he brings me back a little to my time in the BVI.  Maybe it's time to work more of that in.

Back in the Studio of Brian Rutenberg

Had the great pleasure of meeting this guy junior year of college, touring his studio in NYC, getting the gritty details of what it's like to live as an artist in that concrete jungle.

I was also really intrigued by his comparisons of art and music and story--how different colors juxtaposed created a "buzzing", how a painting could be read left to right, and the quality and length and intersection of lines and color planes created a sort of dynamic velocity leading to a climax and denouement.  Big inspiration for my thesis, back in the day.

Recently these videos came into my life: http://www.brianrutenbergart.com/video_doc.html

Here are some highlights (hastily transcribed as I made a Suzanne Mubarak collage--some of the fun of lesson planning for an art class):

"There is no instant gratification in a painting.  We need repeated encounters."  There are layers of information that we need to come back to, like seeds

He equates the decorative with pleasure--two things almost impossible to codify, two things that relate intimately with being fully present in the moment

The application of color as "percussive", the meeting of those planes as "tectonic"

"Sometimes the most beautiful colors are the muck and mud at the bottom."

"You need to carefully observe the transitions in your life" since, as in a painting, those are a sort of crux around which the whole rest of everything hinges

"A finished painting is a dead painting." --Picasso

Rutenberg hopes "an unfinished painting requires the consciousness of the viewer to fill in the gaps."

"My hardest day is still easier than someone else's easiest day...but painting is crucial in a subtler way.  Our job is culture.  We make the beautiful and the hideous collide at a hundred miles per hour."

"I feel most like myself when I'm working."

"Intuition is greater than instinct.  Intuition is informed spontaneity."

"In a painting you start like a bricklayer and end like a jeweler."

"There's nothing worse than a painting that tries to do too much."

"All of the content is located in the tip of the brush."

"The painting becomes finished when that blanket drops, when it attains transparency."

"An eye not told what to see sees more."

"If it sounds good, it is good." Count Basie

"You can't have movement and velocity without stillness."

"All I do all day is negotiate contrasts."

"There's too much emphasis on novelty in art."

"Inspiration's for amateurs.  The rest of us just show up and work." --Chuck Close

"Painting is about creating problems, not solving them."

"A painting (like life) is a series of slow motion trainwrecks."

Donna Backues

http://www.donnabackues.com/

Gorgeous pen and ink and watercolor and gouache aerial quasi-abstracts.  I think she would've gotten along capitally with Adriel Heisey.

And guess what color she used in her painting about the Gulf oil spill?

...Biloxi Blue!

Skinny Legs and All

My first Tom Robbins experience.

His words are an Amazon--thick with imagery, like poetry, and somehow unexpected and inevitable at the same time.

Also, I'm feeling very in touch with my inner cosmic woman.  Maybe it's just coincidence that the leading lady also happens to be an artist?  Who knows.

I can't really say a whole lot more without giving it away.  Maybe this picture will begin to describe the complex interweaving of art, religion, politics, feminism, questions about the seriousness of life in the face of perceived end-of-the-world, balancing act between vision and veil, the bendability of space, and the long slow realization--as long and slow as the imperceptibly moving street performer Turn Around Norman--that there are no dichotomies (not even between self and other, between animate and inanimate, between levity and hilarity, between art and life)--only an eons-long spectrum.

"In the haunted house of life, art is the only stair that doesn't creak" 28

"There is a place between the cerebrum and the stars where sky stops and space commences" 52

"In the immobile whirls the infinite" 63

"Leave me in the night but please don't leave me in the dark" 75

"Those people who recognize that imagination is reality's master, we call 'sages,' and those who act upon it, we call 'artists'." 91

"The lunar mirror simply reflects the poetry in us all" 138

"The purpose of art is to provide what life does not" 144

"Give her pattern and color, give her a map of the higher mind, a map woven from dreams and hair and dyed with spices and wine.  Give her beauty, in other words.  Give her humanity's best shot. Give her art." 157

"We must accept unfairness as proof of the sublime flux of existence, the capricious music of the universe" 186

"It would seem that the human brain hangs so many curtains between itself and the true universe that eventually light can no longer reach it, and it molds and rots and festers in the dark." 215

"I've got a cold spot and a hot point" 225

"Wasn't there a surplus in life of the boring, the repetitive, the mediocre, and the tame? Shouldn't she be glad, grateful for this intrusion of the unexpected and unexplained?" 292

"When a person accepts a broader definition of reality, a broader net is cast upon the waters of fortune" 295

"In other words, the ideas were trapped in the art objects, themselves; from which, due to lack of expression, they could never break free to ride the retinal rails into the mystery tunnels of the psyche." 323

"Contradiction may be an unavoidable trait in a many-faceted sensibility in an expanding universe, but bitterness is reductive in the most trivializing way" 349

"Sand is to plaster what erudition is to the heart" 362

"(Humanity's) mission in life had nothing to do with any struggle between classes, races, nations, or ideologies, but was, rather, a personal quest to enlarge the soul, liberate the spirit, and light up the brain." 406

...and not my favorite one to end on, but worth a save:

"Security is a form of paralysis, just as satisfaction is a form of death" 409