Musing Over Watershed Moments

Organizing Inventory for Upcoming Art Festival

There is the new movement.  There always has been the new movement and there always will be the new movement.  It is strange that a thing which comes as regularly as clockwork should always be a surprise.

In new movements the pendulum takes a great swing, charlatans crowd in, innocent apes follow, the masters make their successes and they make their mistakes as all pioneers must do.  It is necessary to pierce to the core to get at the value of a movement and not be confused by its sensational exterior.

Robert Henri, The Art Spirit

As a perpetual idealist, I have known the exhilaration of recording a life filled with new movements, first movements, watershed moments, epiphanies and fresh beginnings.  As an aging student of history, I still feel my blood stirred when I read of pivot points in the history of ideas, art and litetature.  Though my blog posts have fallen off of late, my mind has not.  I am still recovering from a lingering illness, and the daily school routine along with the art business have taken all my prime time for a couple of weeks now.  I have been storing my daily ideas and readings in my handwritten journals, but have struggled to shape them into blog posts, with the daily schedule getting crazier.  I begin a three-day art festival tomorrow (Friday), and then go straight into a week-long plein air painting event, and enter into yet another art competition.  The following week, I close out school for the semester and launch a two-day watercolor workshop.  The week after, I launch a week-long watercolor workshop.  When I return for that, I begin teaching summer school for the duration of the summer.  No rest for the sick.  In the past forty-eight hours, I have framed five new watercolors, matted and sleeved about a dozen more, and have created over thirty new greeting cards with my watercolor images and newly-composed texts.

Despite all the industry, I am stirred up with new thoughts, new aspirations for painting and pursuing new compositions.  This three-day weekend, I will enjoy the art public as I sit in my booth during the festival (The Levitt Pavilion in Arlington, Texas opens its music season Friday night).  And during slack times, I will be recording new thoughts in the journal for what I wish to engage next.  On Monday, I get to pursue my painting passion with abandon (Paint Historic Waxahachie, Texas).  To consolidate my energy, I have been retiring to bed about three hours earlier than normal.  I just cannot seem to get enough rest, and still am not back to full strength.  I certainly don’t want to “cave” when the plein air season hits next week.  I’ll be doing school every day and painting every evening.

Following the spirit of Robert Henri, I am excited about this chance to “pierce to the core” of the movement that is currently carrying me, examining it for its value.  I’m ready to put this school term behind me and enjoy some quiet space in which I can scrutinize this art enterprise, and get a sense of what I am doing.  Below is one of the five new paintings I’ve framed.  I’m looking forward to putting it before the public view at the Levitt Pavilion tomorrow.

Warm, Proustian Screen Door Memories

Thanks for reading.

I paint in order to remember.

I journal because I feel alone.

I blog to remind myself that I am not alone.

A Modern Re-Formation of the Parisian Cafe

Eight days have passed since my last blog post.  I was struck down by a viral infection, my entire body ached, and headaches prevented me from using my eyes to read or paint.  But I had plenty of time to think (and sleep).  First, I thank all of you readers who found out I was ill, and reached out to me with gracious words.  That gesture of kindness set off a litany of thoughts that I’m still trying to sort out, and hope to set forth in tonight’s post.

I’m thrilled to report that my sickness has apparently passed, and though quite weak, I at least am able to read and write again, and look forward to painting as soon as possible.  I was in the mood to paint this evening, but storm watching took precedence.  Forty-five minutes ago, a tornado passed over my neighborhood, fortunately not touching down, but the local sirens blasted for a good ten minutes until certain that the menace had departed.

Getting back to the well-wishers from the blogosphere, people I have not even met personally–I could never adequately tell you how much I appreciate your good will, and how your kindness has put some things in perspective for me.  For years I have assembled, through my studies, all these fascinating pieces to a puzzle of Parisian café life in the 1920s and 30s.  I was engrossed in the general daily cycle of Picasso’s life, as he painted in the studio all night long, went to bed in the wee hours of the morning, rose and went to the café to socialize with other creative spirits, then returned to the studio in the late afternoon or early evening to begin the cycle anew.  He balanced his creative solitude with his social needs.

I have always regarded the making of art as a solitary enterprise, and that is where I spend long hours in my special Cave, making art, reading, journaling, always thinking and planning anew.  My daily round of public school teaching surrounds me with people, and I do enjoy the bond of exchanging ideas with students, lighting fires and watching them respond with enthusiasm.  But I really do not thrive any longer in the work environment.  I make my living there, do my duties there, and try to have a good time while educating students.  The blogosphere has become my Parisian café, and I never really realized it until this time of illness.  There are scores of blogs that I have to visit daily, and I am always amazed at the ideas, the poetry, the images, the songs that soar through those blogs.  And I occasionally post comments and some of those actually germinate into an ongoing dialogue with that creative spirit/blogger.  And I try to answer every single post on my blog, and there are a number of those creative spirits who continue to “talk” to me.  Always I have found encouragement and gleaned new ideas through these encounters.  But I guess it wasn’t until I became ill, stopped blogging (too sick even to think about writing), that I was shocked to receive words of encouragement from other bloggers who had “missed” my daily posts.  What a surprise, how unspeakably touching that was!  It was then that I realized that I had finally found a “café” where I could commune with other creative spirits.

In the days ahead, I hope I’ll be able to find quality time to integrate all my scattered notes and files from over the years, studies I had done of those café spirits of Paris—Picasso, Hemingway, Stein, Joyce, Anderson, Sartre, and see if I can find a way to consolidate the visual and literary arts the way this generation managed to do.  I feel privileged to sample this synergy of the Parisian café.   My heartfelt thanks goes out to this corner of the blogosphere.  You do make a difference—at least you have for me.  I can’t wait to re-join you in the next conversation.  I cannot wait till the next moment when I stride into the cafe and take my seat among these artistic spirits.  We’ll join in the spirit of Picasso and his literary friends as we exchange our views and encourage one another to continue on in this enterprise.

Thanks for reading.

I paint in order to remember.

I journal because I am alone.

I blog, knowing full well that I am not alone.

Today, I Proudly Accept the Liebster Award

Not long after the midnight hour, I discovered that I had been nominated for the Liebster Blog Award, and wish to express a heartfelt “Thank You” to Zeebra Designs & Destinations ( http://playamart.wordpress.com/) for this honor.  I have been a follower of this site for awhile now, and marvel at the energy this creative artist exudes in day-to-day designing.

Contingent to accepting this award, I have been asked to submit five random facts about myself:

1. I turned 59 years of age April 20, and though I have a Ph.D., I regard myself as a “gray spirit yearning in desire to follow knowledge like a sinking star, beyond the utmost bound of human thought” (“Ulysses”).

2. I received my Bachelor’s Degree in Art in 1976, but went to work in various professions, from pastoral ministry to law enforcement and ultimately to part-time university and full-time public school teaching.  I returned to art in the late 1980′s and chose to focus on watercolor, the medium I loved the most, but could never seem to master.  My guiding spirits are Andrew Wyeth, Edward Hopper, Winslow Homer and J. M. W. Turner.

3. I am an avid fly fisherman, wishing I could live in the Colorado mountains.  My breathing changes the moment I step into a crystal clear mountain stream, and see rainbows and browns lying in the current, watching the bugs go by.  When a trout rises to sip at my dry fly, my pulse flutters.  I don’t know how many times I have read the novella A River Runs Through It, or how many times I have watched that film.  There is nothing like fly fishing in a mountain stream.

4. I perpetually suffer from Wanderlust.  I love going on road trips, have read Jack Kerouac’s On the Road at least once all the way through, and could not begin to count how many times it has been read to me (I have the 10-CD set on audiobook, and I play it on long road trips).  My lifestyle is to take my watercolor supplies on the road and record the places I go, the things I see, in watercolor.  I am an avid plein air painter.

5. I love to read and keep a journal.  As a teacher for twenty-four years in Philosophy, Art History and the Humanities, I have always had a Faust-like obsession to search out everything that is out there, to pick the minds of the best writers and thinkers throughout the centuries.  I love reading Greek and translating the ancients.   I love American literature.  I love poetry.  I love the essay.  My patron saints are Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Carlos Williams, Henry David Thoreau, Friedrich Nietzsche and Paul Tillich.

Five questions to answer:

1. What 3 words best describe you?  driven, multi-interested, curious
   
2. What is your most prized possession?  my Martin D-35 dreadnought acoustic guitar
   
3. If you had 10 minutes to evacuate your house what 5 things would you take with you (not including family members or pets)?  My five best framed watercolors (the only possessions that could not be replaced)
4. What’s the best piece of advice you’ve been given?  When you entered this life, you were dealt five cards.  You played the hand you were dealt the best you could.
5. What is the one food item you can’t live without?  Sorry.  I just can’t take that question seriously.
   

My nominations for the Liebster Blog Award are:

http://coreyaber.wordpress.com/

http://lifeofawillow.wordpress.com/

http://lindahalcombfineart.wordpress.com/

http://photographyofnia.com/

http://theeffstop.com/

These are the five bloggers who really keep my work going, in addition to the five nominated already by zeebra designs.

I apologize that I don’t have new artwork to post today.  It was a four-hour state-mandated testing day at school today, followed by two hours of regular classes.  It wiped me out (again).  We’ll do this every day this week.  This afternoon when I got home, all I felt like doing was rearranging and reconfiguring my man cave, getting it ready for the next watercolor composition.  I hope to have that one set up and ready to paint by tomorrow afternoon.

Thanks always for reading.

I paint in order to remember.

I journal because I am alone.

I blog to remind myself that I am not alone.

The Seer, Part 2

Re-Touched Watercolor, after Masquing Removal

Art after all is but an extension of language to the expression of sensations too subtle for words.

Robert Henri, The Art Spirit

Most of what we express creatively is prelinguistic.

Ian Roberts, Creative Authenticity

Too subtle for words.  Prelinguistic.  Indeed.  I fumble for words, trying to blog what I find so appealing in these vintage doors, aside from the fact that they remind me in Proustian fashion of what I saw, visiting grandparents in rural southeast Missouri during my childhood years.  Over the past twelve years, I have acquired a total of nine vintage doors that are now hinged together in twos and threes.  They form the modular walls that shape and re-shape the space in my garage Man Cave.  I love hanging antique signs on them, attaching reading lamps to them, sitting among them reading, and for the past few months decided it was time to start putting them into my watercolor compositions.  I note with bemusement that for the past decade, as I’ve sat among them reading and journaling, I have often looked up from what I was doing, and found myself staring at the details of their abused surfaces, wondering how I could “solve” some of those textures in watercolor and drawing techniques.  I guess one could say I’ve been “composting” these recent watercolor experiments for over a decade now.

So, what is it exactly that I “see” in these compositions?  A potential sale?  A market?  A new style, new genre to pursue?  Not really.  I see character, I see history, I see volumes and volumes of stories.  When I look at the body of an abused, vintage guitar, I see stories.  I see the worn places along the neck, especially on the 3rd, 5th and 7th frets, and muse about the “boxes” this guitarist made use of when he worked on lead riffs.  I look at the cigarette burns near the nut, and realize the guitarist frequently inserted his cigarette up there while playing, a makeshift ashtray.  I have a pre-World War II Gibson archtop that belonged to my late uncle.  There are grooves above the frets, showing that he preferred the C chord, along with the G and D.  The nicks all over a guitar body tell the story of clubs, bars, campouts–all the places the guitar had visited during the player’s life.

When I look at these doors, I can tell which sides were interior and which were exterior.  I can tell which ones had a screen door in front. leaving the sun imprint as a stencil on the door.  I can see the key gouges around the locking plates, the grime on the porcelain door knobs, the dents in the metal ones.  I can see at the bottoms where they have been constantly kicked open, I suppose when one’s arms were laden with groceries or provisions.  So many stories.  So many lives.  Now they stand mute in my garage.  But I take up the brush and record their stories, adding my own as well.   And of course, I lay my memories over the tops of the stories, leaving a virtual palimpsest for readers to translate.

What I see in subjects such as these, and what I think about the art milieu are things that defy words, yet I managed to cover my blog with yet more words.  But what are my alternatives?  I love to paint, love to muse, love to stretch.  And I love to share what’s going on. I appreciate that there are those “out there” who take the time to look at these images, read these words and have something to say in return.  I’m appreciative of that as well.

Thanks for reading.

I paint in order to remember.

I journal because I am alone.

I blog to remind myself that I am not alone.

---

 

The Dawn

Working on a Watercolor of a Screen Door

The Vedas say, “All intelligences awake with the morning.”  Poetry and art, and the fairest and most memorable of the actions of men, date from such an hour.  All poets and heroes, like Memnon, are the children of Aurora, and emit their music at sunrise.  To him whose elastic and vigorous thought, keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning.  It matters not what the clocks say or the attitudes and labors of men.  Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me.  Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

I awoke to a beautiful Sunday morning, before 8:00.  After a quick shower, grooming and breakfast, I entered the Cave with delight and began whittling away on this screen door study which has gotten hold of me.  My companion this morning is this watercolor song sent me several weeks ago.  I cannot get it out of my head, and it has apparently been enriching many bloggers.  I enclose the link below:

http://shygemini.wordpress.com/2013/04/08/watercolor/

Rae Hering has written a song here that really moves me, really helps get the creative juices flowing when I’m alone in my Cave.  I like her notion of “Getting to Know Myself Again.”

I’m hoping for another splendid day like yesterday.  I have a stack of books ready to be opened, a journal open and ready for recording thoughts, and of course, watercolors in progress.

Thanks for reading.  I should be posting later in the day.

I paint in order to remember.

I journal because I am alone.

I blog to remind myself that I am not alone.

Capping a Full Day and Night in the Studio

Watercolor of Screen Door

My brains are fried, and my eyes refuse to focus any longer.  Since rising at 8:30 this morning, this entire day and night has been given to the studio, both watercoloring and reading.  The time has been absolutely sublime, just what the doctor ordered.  

I am unable to photograph well at night under my studio lamps.  The masquing fluid is still all over the composition as well, so it’s rather difficult for me to show what’s going on.  I’ll have better images in the morning and will push this one quite a bit further along its path.  But I am loving the activity so far!

Thanks for reading.

I paint in order to remember.

I journal because I am alone.

I blog to remind myself that I am not alone.

Imagination vs. Technique

Vintage Bomber Lure

These students have become masters of the trade of drawing, as some others have become masters of their grammars.  And like so many of the latter, brilliant jugglers of words, having nothing worth while to say, they remain little else than clever jugglers of the brush.

Robert Henri, The Art Spirit

Our famous American poet Wallace Stevens worked all his adult life in Connecticut for Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company.  One can only imagine how alone he was in his day-to-day work environment.  He called a colleague into his office one day and asked:

“Can you give me your idea of what imagination is”?

His colleague answered: “I don’t have an idea.”

Stevens replied: “Why don’t you think about it a couple of days and come back and we’ll talk about it.”

His colleague, years later, said he was glad the subject was never mentioned again.

For the past few days, I’ve been musing over the “imagination vs. technique” issue in art.  I suppose we all do that, wonder how much of our work is technical proficiency and how much of it really is “art”.  For years I wondered if I was just an illustrator or if I actually could regard myself as an artist.

I’m reading Robert Henri’s The Art Spirit.  I am haunted by this: “An artist who does not use his imagination is a mechanic.”

Recently, in the studio, I am trying to improve mechanics, explore techniques, learn to master a few more tricks.  But all the while I’m pondering that mystery–how does a composition become “art”.  What is it that makes a work of art worth looking at longer than a glance.  I of course don’t have answers for these.  Meanwhile, I just keep playing in the studio, enjoying this enterprise.  I’m glad I got one kicked out of my way already.  Time to move on to the next endeavor.

Thanks for reading.

I paint in order to remember.

I journal because I am alone.

I blog to remind myself that I am not alone.

More Possibilities Than I Can Pursue on a Day of Watercoloring

My Private Art Student Oil Painting en Plein Air

This Saturday is off to a roaring start.  First, I wanted to post this photo of my private art student doing her first oil en plein air, early yesterday evening.  What you are looking at took her one hour to do.  Fifteen minutes later, she was finished.  First time!  And she just turned 16.  She is enrolled in a magnet school of the Fine and Performing Arts, and has a great future.  I am amazed at her creative flourish.

Before retiring to bed early last night, I had a flood of ideas for what I wanted to do next in watercolor, too many to get done in one day.  I cleaned the Man Cave, rearranged furnishings to suit better what I was about to do, cleared off my gigantic vintage drafting table, and retired to bed happy.  Sleeping in till 8:30, I took an hour to shower, dress, cook breakfast, put on coffee, and get after it.  Only problem was–while showering, I was flooded with several more ideas for watercolor, in addition to what I imagined last night.  TOO MANY IDEAS!  A little frustrating.  Einstein once wondered why he got his greatest ideas while shaving.  At any rate, I am “loosening up” by working on some vintage fishing lures again.  I sold a couple of originals at my last art festival, so I’ve been intending to punch up my inventory and trying to improve my technique by putting out some more of these on a small scale.  Below is a photo of one just under way.  I’ll be posting more as the day unfolds.

Thanks for reading.

I paint in order to remember.

I journal because I am alone.

I blog to remind myself that I am not alone.

 

Fresh Start on a Vintage Bomber Lure

Laying the Painting Aside to “Compost” Awhile

Closing in on the Finish of this Experiment

It’s been tedious but enjoyable.  I purchased a mechanical drafting pencil so as to keep a sharp point, and carefully, joyfully, drew in every thread of screen mesh over the white areas of the coffee can and surroundings.  Then I dragged an eraser over much of it take away the uniformity.  I continue to rough up the white painted slats to make them grimy in appearance.  I feel that I am getting close to finishing this one out.  I’m going to set it aside and “compost” awhile, deciding what, if anything, needs to be done further.  Perhaps the Cave will be more conducive for painting later in the day.  The 40-degree morning has chilled me to the bone out here.  I think I’m ready to go back into the house and pursue some serious reading.

I’m excited to have a holiday off from school.  I have been aching to read and have so little quality time for it.  The time has arrived.  So many books laying open all over my study desk!

Thanks for reading.

I paint in order to remember.

I journal because I am alone.

I blog to remind myself that I am not alone.

The Pulse of a Holiday Morning

Man Cave on the Holidays

Imagination is the outreaching of mind.  It is the individual’s capacity to accept the bombardment of the conscious mind with ideas, impulses, images, and every other sort of psychic phenomena welling up from the preconscious.  it is the capacity to “dream dreams and see visions,” to consider diverse possibilities, and to endure the tension involved in holding these possibilities before one’s attention.  Imagination is casting off mooring ropes, taking one’s chances that there will be new mooring posts in the vastness ahead.

Rollo May, The Courage to Create

There were obstacles to clear before creating this morning.  I am a sucker for NHL hockey and stayed up late watching Stanley Cup playoffs last night.  School is out today for a Texas holiday, but I set the alarm for 6:00 anyway so I wouldn’t waste a good day with studio potential.  However, it is 41 degrees outside and gusting winds, and I knew the garage studio would be chilly, so I lingered awhile longer under the quilts, trying to talk myself out of getting up.  I’m glad I pushed through anyway.  A breakfast of fried potatoes, grilled onions and scrambled eggs shook loose the cobwebs, the coffee is made, and I’m ready now to face this screen door and see about redrawing the screen wire in front of the white areas of the coffee can, and then finding out how to diminish the starkness of the lighter masqued areas.

Rollo May was my companion this morning, as I reached for inspiration and camaraderie in the studio.  I’m ready to paint now.

Thanks for reading.

I paint in order to remember.

I journal because I am alone.

I blog to remind myself that I am not alone.