imposing his will upon the land

Plucking 250 year old oak trees as easily as unwanted hair,
a man and a single transforming machine, cutting, grabbing, ripping tossing

the sound of money making

levelling the wooded acreage
behind my home.. behind my house... where I live .. where I paint...

in one day
it is gone

the color dance through countless rounds of seasons changing
yellow acid green to leather red, purple and grey,
the sun low in the winter, high in the summer
a tapestry of changing light

Dust hangs over the piles of dying leaves and bleeding trunks,
the smell of sugar, sickening sweet in the summer sun.
I stand like a post, gaping at this scene, my heart shut down in helpless silence

what can be said
how can this be so

birds cry out
the raccoons will have to find another place to sleep
the tree frogs will not sing tonight

teaching practice Painting Painting

taken too seriously, anything can become the instrument of its own undoing. Teaching a full credit painting class in five weeks is a stand out in the world of bad ideas. But, it is not clear that any specific amount of time is a relevant factor in becoming a painter.
In my experience it is an obsession; persistent, inescapable. It is something a feel the lack of, if I stay away from it and it is something that consumes me when I am at it.

I can only point towards the way, encourage a student to keep going... I am not a painting teacher. I am a painter. The painting 'teachers' I had as a student, painted on my work, took it over, pushed and shoved me to their purpose.

The masters, watched, encouraged me to become more of what I was, to travel further on the road I was already on. They knew that my journey had started from the first moment I saw that such a thing was possible, and though my voice had not yet formed, there was a sign of acknowledgement, recognition... sort of Oh, I recognize this...

One voice asked "why are you in such a rush?" and I answered. " I have a lot of work to do"...

I have always seen the vapor of what is possible.. It is a sort of Grail quest, where the searching is the crucible through which I am formed and reformed.

The creative spirit arrives intact, you can develop some skills and find direction,... art changes but it doesn't progress, it doesn't get substantially better over time...

As an alleged teacher, I am in a position to make this a horrible ordeal, a great obfuscation, a transparent tissue of pretense , an opaque vanguard of privilege, or a journey of beoming...

The desire or need to express arrives intact, of it's own volition, settling in random hearts, across socio-political divides without bidding, without purpose...

to see what everyone else sees, but more, something miraculous in the every day ... to transform ... to feel something spring from your idea to hand to some thing .. the externalization of an inner impulse...

In a classroom, I can create a space that maybe supports the idea of painting.. I can help with materials, facilitate some technical development.. I can ask that they look, but I cannot teach them to see... Can I create the desire to see, yes.. but if they can not see, maybe that is even worse... Can I suggest that seeing differently is OK, yes. I can do that... will it hold.. I don't know... I have a nerve even trying...

facsimile simulacre or just tired

some thoughts from remembering my dad

Growing up

On tippy-toe, I stretch
To touch the highest point,
Some thing….
just out of reach.

My measure might increase my power, my value.
From this new place, I could be more, I could be better
and in that way, somehow safe.

At last my fingers reach the mark and I wait.
To know the thing that has changed
in a way that is not noticed.
I t is not enough
Not enough
not enough to make a difference.


Watching the light

The light draws me out of me and in my mind,
I travel the dance of light across the waters surface.
Lying on my stomach, I can feel the warm wood.
My face pressed into the dock, I smell salt and smoke.

Though the cracks in the soft grey wooden planks of wood
melted into the softly painted light that marks the rippled surface.
to join the licks of wind lifting the water in salty wet licky licks

The sun is bright and leads me, to join the river below,
dark and cold, a solid blackened slate of liquid.
The winds pierces through the gaps in the wood,
making stripes, a horizontal pattern of cold that spreads from below.


Secrets of the Sea

Off, high,
caw, caw caw, caw of a gull, suspended
Waiting…

I wait, to learn the secrets of the sea
Whispered in a breath

time of no time, no place
not asleep, not awake,
I am above watching from below,
my reflection
from the dock
from the sky, the gull watching me.




Soft Sea

The fine white sand is hot and soft.
It burns and claims my feet, slipping and sliding
Down, down, down and down
Toward the water.

A soft crunching marks the quarter of my passage.
Reaching the top of the path in the dune line,
A sharp smack of sea air, the smell of salt, and
bright mirrored light sears my eyes.
The wind blows the tears from my face before I know what to feel.

At some distance, the sound of families, children squealing and teenage laughter spreads out on the expanse of sea , sand and sky.
A thread of sound from a radio is carried by the wind
and then is gone.

The dry sand gives way to damp and then wet,
hard as I near the water’s fickle edge.
Softer still, the mix of sand and warm water yields to my weight,
covering my feet, holding me there, cast in that place.
A wave curls and rolls to me, gentle and foamy
the sea brume
lingers in bubbled islands
carried up the beach and now abandoned .

Past the soft wet sand there is a line of cast up weed
tangles of shells and sea grass
A light mark of fine white crystal records the reach of a wave

In the shallow, a stretch of mussel shells, brokens bits of blue and silver
that bite and cut my feet.

The waves break clean. Surfers are delivered along trim lines
of aquamarine perfection.

face reduction

of course this is all distraction, but I was thinking it could be animated and altered .. but I better get my packet done. It is the last of the five.

face

This is a face that could use some sleep... I really love the photo booth. I used to do some work around the multiples.. emmm maybe that would be fun...

8" x 10" monotypes (south shore Conn) 2007

These are from some quick sketches I made on the train to Boston looking out over the grasses on a rainy day...

teaching practice

This exercise asked the students to begin by seeing individual bottle shape in grey text news print. The after grouping them and establishing adding a line to establish the surface, they added shadows from half tone photos, then white paper, black paper and after adding the midtone flat grey paint, they could go back in with titanium white for the final highlights.

By parsing out the materials, they were challenged to get the maximum effect with a limited range of materials.

New Painting Section , 5 week marathon

,... em... self-examination is probably not exactly the best thing to do just before beginning what my students call my Samurai painting section for the summer. We meet four mornings a week from 8am-12pm for five weeks. ( which would be only a little nuts for me, but I am also teaching an evening Art History for 6pm-9pm..)

Already, I am so tired that I can't feel my face. That said, I have hammered out some decent lesson plans to get the students up and running and the mornings go by quickly, as do the days, ... maybe I will sleep on Friday at the Dermatologist and later the dentist.. then maybe I can go to the openings I need to go to that evening.
My advisor said that it was good that I was cutting back and showing some sense, but little did she know that it was panic more than clear thinking that pressed me to make some cuts.. hey the cat feeds himself any way.. and I did brush him last week.. or was that last month?

These are mostly painting one students who are from schools other than Prince George's Community College, so it is interesting to see how my lesson plans that often thud in the spring and fall, find fruition in ..emm.. more fertile ground. It doesn't always follow that the accomplishing the learning objectives will produce good paintings, but they will at least have a good foundation to become great genius whatever artists later... The creative spirit of the artist arrives as it is, intact, fractured or inflated by bad teachers... like that line from All Quiet on the Western Front, "You are either alive or dead, you can't lie about that for long..." You can improve their skill set, but the magic is something they will have to do. and for them to see, they have to be present and leave their story behind...

Sister Wendy

The upside of preparing for teaching a summer session of Intro to Art is the challenge of finding a way into the vast subject of Art... covering everything from Art and Civilization/Society, elements of visual literacy and the impetus to create. Sometimes as specialists, artists are the worst ones to attempt to spread out a feast that has only the tips of the subjects that they themselves have lingered over for months, years... maybe even a life time..
But, somehow Sister Wendy floats around this video poking her uneven teeth and odd speech into various windows of very clear, personal seeing. The "Mists of Time" is one of my favorite chapters from this series and maybe that will work to engage the class and also serve to carry them through the early time-line of Western Art. I have only one week to charge through Lascaux-Rome. As a student, my undergrad survey covered from Lascaux to Kouros in one semester. UGh!