Confessions Of A Mid Career Artist

 July 2nd, 2023

I wanted to write.  When I was thirteen.  Thirty years ago.  I wanted to be one who was mad for life.  Whose ghosts haunt the teenage mind, part of the pantheon of culture heros who burn bright and light the connections of the past with the present, who transcend that terrible limitation, and ultimate gift, human mortality.

I want to write, now.  I want to write and do yoga and walk in the wild places and make pictures and shine my light on the curiously complex net of being that is in and around me.  

Movement heals.  

My brother who has dealt with terrible pain and injuries told me that.  

Does anything ever really heal?  Is that an illusion on the chopping block, as well?  

Like the synchrony of artistic merit and some ultimate value as an existing thing? 

The counselor said that when we do deep healing work, we heal seven generations back, and seven generations forward.

It's hard to even get enough sleep so that my brain doesn't electrocute itself violently several times a day.

I wonder, has my art healed me, or made things worse?  I wonder about the process, about the time spent making my marks, sifting through the kaleidoscope of my mind and my life, and sorting, and deciding..this here, with this, and scribble, and white, and thick, and thin, and this, and this big, put it on this wall, say it is about this...and clearly it is about this, and that...

Does that soothe my brain?  Is it self-soothing?  Is that what I have been doing, here?

The Last Word Laughing, oil, charcoal, graphite, assemblage on masonite, 48"x48", 2009

collection of the artist

Of course, there are also the fumes to consider.

And, I suppose, another pertinent question is: does it soothe anyone else's brain?  Like, maybe, remind them of a happy dream or memory or vision?  Help them hum a tune itching at the edge of their consciousness? 

Maybe, like in this one:

Conversations With The Ancestors or Babes in Rainbowland, oil, color pencil, pyrography, collage, varnish on FSC certified Sustainably Harvested Maple, 48" x 29.5", 2020, available for acquisition

the viewer might suppose, yes, this is probably the artists woman, but the reverie, the adoration, mystery, flow, forms and setting actually belong to me, belong to my longing, mystery.  My Quest.  And, that quest, for connection, for meaning, for purpose...that is the quest of all beings, in all times...all beings enmeshed in the same mechanism, what we name the verb being. 

Transcend.  Transcend.  Transcend.

That is Art.

They had us read Walden, summer before 11th grade.  The stripped down, intentional life experiment...

I have gone into the back-country with this intent, into the ocean, and into the studio.

I go in order to find what is essential, and what is bullshit.

Thorny question.

Corny question.

When you put it like that.

I gave up on words, kinda...I gave up on hoping to convey in words, the depth of my experience, my passion, my pain...when I was 19.  Marks became more appropriate.  I couldn't get the words to do what I needed them to do, which was get the pain and sadness out of my body.

My Heart, oil on panel, 18" x 24", 2004, private collection

The idea, for me, is to scar time itself.  The body is too short in duration.  These shots across the bow of being (the bough of being?)...

I spent time in the Museo del Prado, in Madrid, seat of the largest colonial empire (tied, England?) in the history of the world, shatterer of geography, language, and culture...and I stared at Guernica...for hours, days...making studies...thinking...feeling...Picasso had scarred time itself...but he had done it for beauty.

Art is genocides only apology.

So maybe these are my apology, to the ecocide...to the past, where it is all inevitable...to the everything, who smiles and whispers gently 'There there, child'....apology to the great cosmic mother, the Ouroboros, who knows no seperateness, whose every act is a palimpsest, both doing and undoing.

But, mothers do appreciate meaning, do they not?  

Gesture.  Formality.

Repetition.

That is how they instruct.

Protection, oil on panel, 48" x 36", 2004

Ma died.

And I had to go get her.  

And clean up.

And now I say: "What is left?"

Life has conspired to bring me into the high country of the mind, sitting in the rich heat of the Sierra Nevada foothills, to visit more scars.  Mines and train tracks and tunnels and freeways and community centers.

WPA Art-Deco building & Board President, built 1940, photographed 2023

Time to set up shop.  

And I am thinking, fuck it, scar the scars, on the scar of eternity that is Time itself--the canyons are scars.  

The planets and stars are blemishes on the undifferentiated singularity of what would otherwise be perfection.  A perfect nothingness.

I'll make some pictures, I will write some words, I will design some buildings at the snow line, to see what is bullshit, and what will endure.  

Learn how to make buildings stand up on the steepness, learn how to keep standing as long as you can.

Even when your brain explodes, and your heart bursts, and you cannot place the name.

Make a Sierra series.

A few of the Coast Ranges are still available.

Coast Ranges Pt 3: Los Osos Valley, oil on panel, 29" x 18", 2004, available

And I'm sure I will make a few more of There, as seen from Here.

Because that is what I can do, I shall do it.

Something to do. 

Intentionally.  Without fear or reservation.  

Just another soul the cosmic mother called to birth, or away, to make another set of scars on Time, itself.

Beauty. Truth. Love.

Things that cannot be measured, because they are integral to that secret magic, that we call Being...and the Net cannot measure itself....

The Net of Being, 32" x 32", graphite and pyrography on Luan, private collection

But it can try, and I suppose that trying and failing is the something that is everything.

Something to do.