Time Goes By

AprApril is the cruelest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain
-T.S. Eliot, “The Wasteland”

Today, I am hiding out from the atrocious pollen count in California (I always thought that Elliot was talking about allergies--as it turns out, he was talking about the cruelty of hope in a hopeless time, according to Michael Austin (thanks Google!)) by staying in my apartment with the blinds drawn and furiously eating bee pollen to try and force my immune system to bee friends with it (get it?). It has been more than a year since I have written a blog post. I can't seem to crack the algorithm on the old facestergrammers, and, at any rate, there is no slowness there, no space for thought and reflection, for development, for depth. And, so....

The Post Covid Post, or, Unfinished Business

I chose a profession that is also a dream.

That is an interesting metaphor--

A dream.

[It is hard to do your taxes on-time, and be in an altered state of consciousness as a profession, simultaneously. I've always dreamt of finding a handler. [Enter misanthropy.]]

See, vision is the sense that precipitates our constructions of reality more that any other. It is the verifier. It creates the world.

What the magician, the artist, the seer does is to alter, question, and direct our perceptions of the nature of reality itself.

This has always been conceptualized as a supernatural ability, an energy passing through the artist acting as a medium, servant to greater energetic exchanges. I like that. I also like the idea that I am special, significant, a unique moment in the history of the universe. If one can hold both ideas in time, that one is special and one is a servant, one partakes in the divine while still maintaining access to and enjoying the creature comforts of a professional in the contemporary West, the richest and most comfortable of all possible worlds. So the art school brochures go.

This is the dream.

So, how does one access the divine?

Well. It is a process.

What interests me is restraint in the plastic arts. A respect for the sacredness of the material world; nature; that which happens of its' own accord, the taoist concept of wu wei. I find that working with photographs that accrue emotional and spiritual salience through the process of translating them to other mediums is a great way to elevate the inherent miracle of the appearance of the world, in situ, with just enough interruption to create the awareness that it is, perhaps in reality, all a memory, an illusion, a dream.

A vision:

Youth and Beauty and That Which Truly Matters, Pt III,

gesso, charcoal, oil paint on canvas, 30.5" x 40", 2010/11

listed on artist's website view

See. The important thing about a vision (a dream) (a painting), is that it is also, we firmly believe, not reality. We like it when the emotional response is clear, direct, fresh, but we prefer it when that emotion is also deep, and abiding, and able to be picked up and doled out and set down again. Humans always want both.

In the space between seeing and being, is freedom-is the ability to move, to shake, to change, to effect. The death of illusion is the birth of the world, in situ. Lived reality, with its' depth and fullness, the piled cart of emotion, sensation, conjecture, pain, pleasure, so on and so forth, is, in essence, the interruption of vision by embodied experience. This is why process is so important to me. The body interacting with materials. My body. It is a purification ritual as much as it is a soiling of the beautiful pure potential of the tabula rasa, a blank canvas, an empty mind, an open day on the calendar. The strongest of my works achieve a very special balance--of fullness and emptiness, vision and experience, voice and silence.

Sometimes they are more directly about experience and the body and the nearly unbearable and excruciatingly intimate busy-ness of being alive, enmeshed with others as we are:

Relationships, or The Net of Being, 2017, mixed media on panel, 30" x 30"

listing on website link

And, sometimes, the directness of the mark, the moment, the vision, the pathos, the concept and the image is poised in a very respectful, nuanced and balanced dialogue. I think this image of a homeless person sleeping on a park bench is a good example. Recalling the dissolution of the ego and even the physical being of the individual back into constituent parts, to be recycled by the planet-in-the-cosmos, the beauty and the tragedy of this, is left intentionally un-resolved; part of me yearns for another way. By re-presenting visions of the inexorable un-becoming of life in a way that is loose, transparent, seemingly unfinished, I am hoping to leave room for alternate timelines and potentialities. The aesthetic triumph of beauty over the tragedy of death. Signification. Meaning in the massive mystery that is our universe. That paradox. That balance. That is my vision. That is my dream.