Recovering my Balance

My writing desk in Studio Eidolons

My “art area” of Studio Eidolons (Paddington sleeps in his bed to the right)

My Dad’s Pennsylvania RxR lantern at my reading table

Sometimes it really does feel as though your brain is extended so far into the outward world, it’s left your body. When this happens, it’s very difficult to go back inward and be alone with your thoughts. That’s what depth comes down to, really, taking all the stuff your mind has gathered in its travels back inside, to sort through it and see what it all means. To make it your own. The only way to cultivate a happy, inner life is to spend time there, and that’s impossible when you’re constantly attending to the latest distraction.

William Powers, Hamlet’s Blackberry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age

My friends have reached out, wondering why my blog went silent. Thanks, all of you, for caring. As some of you know, my art calendar finally reached a spread of days with no appointments, and in that rest, my Father’s passing last month finally hit me. Hard. I haven’t posted, because I felt I had nothing constructive to write, and I feared posting a whiny blog.

I have spent the bulk of this Saturday in Studio Eidolons, sorting out my life, and that has been what the doctor ordered. I overheard myself complaining like the antihero in Herzog by Saul Bellow’s: “my thoughts are shooting out all over the place.” I was distracted in the midst of my library, surrounded by my favorite books, all of them calling out to me. I was equally distracted by the oncoming events in my art calendar. October is always an extremely busy, though rewarding, month.

As I opened my journal to pour out my heart and seek some sort of guidance, I found myself asking to find that balance between the inner life and the social demands that keep chorusing. Turning to Hamlet’s Blackberry, I found genuine sustenance in the Marshall McLuhan chapter “A Cooler Self: McLuhan and the Thermostat of Happiness.” Much of what I read took me far, far back to my first profound culture shock as a college student.

My freshman year at the university swept my feet out from under me like a tidal wave. For the first time in my life, I was living five hours away from the home and family I knew and depended on. And I suddenly realized that no one in this new environment knew or cared about my needs. If I were to skip a class, there wouldn’t be a professor to inquire why. If I were not to show up for an exam or meet a paper deadline, no professor would hunt me down to inquire why. In addition to this environment of anonymity and indifference, there was a crushing schedule of classes and responsibilities. I felt confused and hopelessly inadequate in the face of these new challenges.

Because of my Baptist upbringing, and advice from one of my church members to join the Baptist Student Union, I finally showed up at their meeting house, and was immediately embraced by a caring community. During my first retreat with them, I attended a seminar titled “Quiet Time” and heard of the value of setting aside a special time each day (preferably morning, before all the demands set in) to read, think, journal, and prepare yourself to go into the day with a sense of direction.

Later in the year, I met a conference speaker named Milt Hughes, who relayed a theory known as Journey Inward, Journey Outward. He used the logo posted below, pointing out to us that the arrows moving to the center of the design indicate your retreat to your “center” to find yourself, and the arrows facing outward reference your journey into the world to do what you have to do. That symbol has never left my consciousness. Throughout the fifty subsequent years of graduate school and teaching, my habit has been to feed myself with daily quiet retreats before entering the social arena to take on whatever task was before me.

Today has been a Quality Day because I finally got back into that groove of retreating into myself to find a sense of meaning, and then laying preparations for going back out into the world. The coming week is already promising to be a busy one, but I’m ready. Today has been a genuine gift. I have felt the presence of my Dad in a good way, sitting in front of his lighted Pennsylvania RxR lantern. And I’ve enjoyed my reading, and my small steps back into the art arena as well.

Thanks for reading. I hope that I’m finally coming back to the blogging groove.

I make art in order to discover.

I journal when I feel alone.

I blog to remind myself I am not alone.

Finishing Up Paintings while Thoughts Continue to Swirl

Far the best part, I repeat, of every mind is not that which he knows, but that which hovers in gleams, suggestions, tantalizing unpossessed before him. His firm recorded knowledge soon loses all interest for him. But this dancing chorus of thoughts and hopes is the quarry of his future, is his possibility, and teaches him that his man’s life is of a ridiculous brevity and meanness, but that it is his first age and trial only of his young wings, and that vast revolutions, migrations, and gyres on gyres in the celestial societies invite him.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his Journal

My tribute to David Crosby

“Railroad Blues”

Sacred Heart Church

. . . still working on this one!

This is not easy to write. Back in April, I posted on social media about the condition of my 94-year-old father who had just endured surgery. He is in St. Louis, my home town, and I reside in Arlington, Texas. I managed a pair of visits spanning a total of twenty days in April and May. What I haven’t shared until now is the news that my father is now in hospice care. We were finally told June 17 that the doctors would not be able to save him and there was only the task of keeping him comfortable as he rests in a care facility. Almost daily I mail him one of my watercolor greeting cards with a letter inside and several pictures of special memories. On some days I mail two or three cards. Sometimes he is able to read them. Sometimes not. Several times in recent weeks, I have received the call that it appears he won’t finish the day. Yesterday I got another one. All we can do is wait.

Painting is one of the few things I am able to do that keeps me focused. I have also been teaching numerous watercolor classes and have workshops coming up as well. Yesterday, I began completing large paintings that have been in progress for months, and decided to put them on this post.

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young

On January 18, David Crosby died. I was seated in The Gallery at Redlands, our home gallery, when I received the news. Opening my sketchbook, I drew this portrait of him.

It was a sad day. But I had no idea in January that 2023 would bring me the current news of my dad, the reality of my now being sixty-nine years of age, and pondering mortality much more than previous years. All this to say that these new realities have not curtailed my creative eros, only intensified it in ways I still try to put in words.

David Crosby is the one musician who remained my muse since 1969, my freshman year in high school. During that year I heard the Crosby, Stills, Nash album and everything changed, musically, for me. I had been playing electric guitar, but immediately switched to acoustic, where I remained until this present day, and continually sought out other musicians who could sing and harmonize with me. In the following decades, I drew his portrait repeatedly, sang his songs, cried when he went to prison, cried again when he passed away. At least I got to watch him perform with his super group, four times. On January 18, I decided I was going to insert CSN&Y into one of my Palestine settings (the relic of the Pearlstone Grocery is a couple of blocks away from our gallery).

The Pearlstone Grocery died many years ago and now continues to decay under the Texas sun. The owner apparently has stuffed the building with his trash, maybe hoping some day a fire will finish off the structure? I never understood why anyone with enough money to purchase an historic building would choose to let it rot away for everyone to view. At any rate, the site of the building with its rich history, tucked into the beautiful landscape of Palestine juxtaposes life and death before my eyes in a way that I try to turn into Art.

“Railroad Blues”

This watercolor is the second in my “Palestine Blues” series. The initial painting I’ve posted before, with the ghost of Lightnin’ Hopkins walking along the rails. In this painting, I’ve added a harp player I met December 8, 2019. He is Don Gallia. The event was the Randy Brodnax Christmas Show, a three-day art festival held inside the Sons of Hermann Hall in the Deep Ellum section of Dallas. On Sunday morning, during Church in the Bar, I was delighted to hear Don blowing harp alongside a pair of guitar players. I took several photos of him as he played, and used one of them as a model so I could insert him into this composition alongside Lightnin’. I’ve added a story for my greeting card of this painting:

Autumn was in the air. Trees were still verdant green, but cool winds flipped the leaves over, showing the creamy undersides, lending sparkle to the crowns. Leaning against a burn barrel outside the relic of the Pearlstone Grocery, a bluesman was blowing harp. The melancholy notes drifted in the wind.

“Watcha playin’ there?” The harp player spun around, startled to see a black man in a broad-brimmed hat, toting a guitar case.

“Jus’ blowin’ I guess.”

“Soun’ like blues t’ me,” the guitar man smiled. “Mine if I join ya?”

“Sure, why not?” The man patted the harmonica on his knee and watched the stranger as he laid the guitar case down on the burnt grass, released the latches, and lifted out his battered guitar. Sitting down on the grass, he reached for the tuning keys and began re-tuning his box to open-G. Then he took out a piece of copper pipe, slipped it on his pinkie, and began making his guitar groan and moan with each slide up and down the neck.

Impressed, the harp player asked, “So how are we gonna do this?”

Looking up, the guitar man smiled and said, “You jus’ play that thang all up and down the walls, an’ I’ll meet cha on the corner.”

Sacred Heart Church

This magnificent Catholic church towers across the street from The Gallery at Redlands. I have painted it countless times, but still strive to get it right. On one particular day, when the sun set behind the church, the rays blazed through the stained glass windows, and I took several photos. This is my first attempt to capture the glory of the stained glass. I thought the composition would be bland if I left the sky nearly white as it was that day when the sun set and blasted through the church interior. Darkening the sky gave the overall composition more pop, but seldom does stained glass glow this brightly from a church’s interior lighting. I’m still puzzling this out for future painting attempts.

still working on this one . . .

These are the remains of the studio belonging to the late Ancel E. Nunn, famous painter and illustrator from Palestine’s glory days. He loved the Bright & Early logo and painted it on the interior wall of his studio for his own inspiration. Alas, his studio now consists of three walls and no roof.

The mural deteriorated and disappeared long ago. My Palestine friend Ben Campbell took many photos of the mural from the days it still existed and let me use his collection to recreate what no longer is visible.

Whence things have their origin, there they must also pass away according to necessity . . . according to the ordinance of time.

Anaximander, 6th century BCE

I wasn’t able to read Greek texts until the early 1980’s. But by the time I did, I had already fixated on my subjects for art–scenes and objects depicting the eroding images of time. When I established my sole proprietorship, I chose Recollections 54, the year of my birth accompanied by scenes of American nostalgia from my childhood. Though now a senior citizen, I still breathe the Wordsworthian recollections of days that have disappeared from our landscape, but not our memories. I am a painter of memories. I still hold them close to my breast like the loving warmth I feel from my small dog in the studio.

As I was working through this blog, pausing at intervals to breathe and begin again, my friend Dian Darr sent this anniversary photo from five years ago. The timing could not be more poignant. July and August were the months Sandi and I enjoyed with Dian and Ron at Riverbend Resort in South Fork, Colorado. The cold breezes from the San Juan mountains were the perfect antithesis to this infernal Texas summer climate. Among my fondest memories were fly-fishing the stream, and sitting on the cabin deck to do watercolor sketches with Jack the camp cat lounging beneath the table.

Reading Emerson’s Journal this morning stirred me deeply and convinced me to try and put out this blog of feelings and emotions I now hold close.

This one’s for you, Dad. Thank you for all you’ve done to enrich us. Thank you especially for passing on to me an eye that seeks to remember.

A Page from the Sketchbook

What does drawing do for me? It slows down my breathing. Relaxes me. And at the same time it focuses me. It allows me to concentrate my gaze, my attention, my love & devotion, to the Subject which has rendered me an object. I have given myself to a Subject, and worshipfully move to translate the experience to a white, two-dimensional rectangle.

Thanks for reading.

Sunday morning thoughts while sketching

We are preparing for yet another day trip today, having returned home late last night from the symphony in Tyler, Texas.

Finding the weather outdoors gorgeous beyond description, I decided to pull up a chair in the garage and see if I could capture some of our neighborhood sites in a SketchBook.

While sketching, my mind does not stop. So when I paused in the midst of the sketch I decided to write the following:

What does drawing do for me? It slows my breathing. Relaxes me. And, at the same time, it focuses me. Drawing allows me to concentrate my gaze, my attention, my love and devotion, to the Subject which has rendered me an object. I have given myself to a Subject, and worshipfully move to translate the experience onto a white, two-dimensional rectangle.

Thanks for reading.

An Artist’s Life

Drafting notes for today’s presentation

A drawing is simply a line going for a walk.

Paul Klee

I leave in an hour to talk with high school art students about the practice of drawing and journaling. My friend and colleague Cindy Thomas, also retired, teaches part time at Pantego Christian Academy. Cindy is not only a painter and installation artist; she has blossomed in recent years as a film maker, and I’m still delighted to play her seven-minute film of me (in my studio as well as the trout stream) on our flat screen TV in the lobby window of The Gallery at Redlands.

Cindy has invited me “to come by and share your journey with journaling and sketchbooks and how they inspire your art.” Frankly, I could choose no better subject to share with a willing audience. I’m ecstatic that this opportunity has been presented, and sincerely hope that what I have to share “takes” with at least one student.

I packed and loaded my vehicle last night. Now, with coffee, I feel an impulse to share with readers my ideas about “an artist’s life”. To be honest, I have no idea what exactly will happen when I enter the classroom. I have a script in my mind, and perhaps that is what I will share. Or something else may pop up, and if that happens, I’ll ride that train instead. One thing about a life of public speaking, classroom lecturing, and dialogue sessions that has paid dividends is the reality that opportunities like today no longer scare me; in fact I got over the fear of addressing audiences before I finished college.

So, exactly what do I want to share with you this morning? My lifestyle as an artist with this luxury of retirement. I no longer rise in the morning to go to a job. I’m retired. But I’m up, generally no later than 7:00 (there are those weird times that I awaken between 4 and 5:00 a.m. and rise to meet the new opportunities.

The first order of the day is making coffee, French Press or Cowboy Coffee. I then bring it to bed where I enjoy at least an hour of “executive time”. Sandi also reads over coffee, and our pair of dogs continue to stretch and slumber as we read in silence. Executive Time is an extension of what I called Quiet Time long ago when I was in the pastoral ministry and made it a practice to start each morning with time studying my Bible.

During this Executive Time, I open my journal to write out the ideas already percolating in my mind. Once the ideas have all been captured as best I can, I open a sketchbook and force myself to make one small drawing. This sketchbook practice I should have been doing the past thirty years or so, but I actually resumed it a few weeks ago, and I’m getting better with the daily consistency. I have always believed that quality art grows out of disciplined drawing, but unfortunately I have not practiced what I believe. Until now.

After I’m satisfied with journaling and sketching, I open a book. My reading is broad, really. Since graduate school, I have loved reading; I am starved for new ideas. I read novels (Larry McMurtry currently), philosophy, art history, poetry, essays. I seek quality writing, hoping that reading the best writing will improve my own writing as well as verbal communications. I still translate Greek–Homer, the Presocratics, the Septuagint, the New Testament, the Church Fathers. I’m trying to teach myself Latin, but that is coming along at a snail’s pace; if I’m not actually taking classes in Latin, I won’t be picking it up any time soon. But I still love the language and poke at it. I have a copy of the Latin Vulgate as well as several volumes of classical. I just love to read, take notes, and weave my own ideas into what I’m reading. That is why I keep a journal and have well over 200 volumes going back to 1985. Some of my reading includes re-reading old journals I’ve kept.

Once I’ve finished my third cup of coffee while doing the above, I walk down the hall to my Studio Eidolons Sunday through Wednesday, downstairs to our Gallery at Redlands (in the Redlands Hotel) Thursday through Saturday. In these spaces, the real magic begins. The morning Executive Time has laid the groundwork for studio creativity.

It’s time to get dressed and leave for this morning’s engagement. More later . . .

Thanks for reading.

I make art in order to discover.

I journal when I feel alone

I blog to remind myself I am not alone.

4:30 a.m. Start . . .

4:30 a.m. sketch

A drawing is simply a line going for a walk.

Paul Klee

I woke this morning around 4:30 with the Paul Klee quote in my head. Unable to return to sleep, the urge to draw a horse whispered to me in the darkness. So, without question I rose, plodded silently down the hall to my Studio Eidolons, and drew the horse head posted above. I like it enough to finish out the body contours with accent lines, then put it into a 4 x 6″ mat and install it into a 10 x 12″ frame and put it in the Gallery at Redlands for sale. If nobody purchases it, the drawing will at least keep me good company. The Palomino was at the Stone Creek Ranch where I just completed a watercolor workshop and packed home years’ worth of memories.

Thanks for reading.

Solitude Eludes Words

Morning Sketch in Studio Eidolons

This writing that you do, that so thrills you, that so rocks and exhilarates you, as if you were dancing next to the band, is barely audible to anyone else.

Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

I felt Annie’s presence this morning, as I sat at the window sketching, the cool gray morning light filling the studio. I also felt an intimate connection to all creatives who know the sweet solitude that comes with writing a song, a literary composition, or creating a piece of visual art. Creative eros is a sweet presence that prevents solitude from descending into loneliness. No doubt we creatives thrive on attention, but we also draw deep sustenance from the act of creating while alone.

For years I’ve floundered, seeking words to reveal the feelings one knows when s/he taps a perfect putt across a green, or lays out a perfect cast with the fly rod, or scrapes the sharpened pencil across the surface of the paper, or plucks the acoustic guitar string in such a way that the note lingers in the air and resonates in the room. And then, I come across a quote by Anais Nin that tells it like it is:

I have never been able to talk as I think, to anyone. With most people you can only talk about ideas, not the channel through which these ideas pass, the atmosphere in which they bathe, the subtle essence which escapes as one clothes them. Most of the time, I don’t feel like talking about ideas anyway. I am more interested in sensations.

Anais Nin (French author/diarist)

The morning is off to a sweet beginning. Thanks for reading.

I make art in order to discover.

I journal when I feel alone.

I blog to remind myself I am not alone.

Turn the Page, and Draw

Studio Eidolons, morning of January 1, 2022

A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance

On the morning of December 15, I awoke and lay in bed quietly for nearly an hour. It was still dark. I didn’t care what time it was, but knew I was close to dawn. And yet the mental dawn had already occurred. A series of visions had visited me in my half-sleep and by the time I was fully awake, I knew what I was going to do as soon as I finished the college semester, the watercolor commissions, the trip to St. Louis, Christmas, and the return to The Gallery at Redlands to set up the January show for Deanna Pickett Frye.

Now it is the first day of 2022, more than two weeks after the pre-dawn visitation, and I am finally taking up the project that knocked on my visual door. Last night before the New Year dawned, I commenced sketching and journaling.

New Years Eve Musings

First sketch of Jan 1, 2022

Rising this morning, I decided I wanted to follow up on what I reviewed last night in my Studio Eidolons regarding the sixth-century Canons of Chinese painter Xie He. I am absorbed with this idea of qi that is translated as “breath, vapor, spirit” and was believed by the Daoists to be the vital force animating life and art. This is discussed in the First Canon. The Second one discusses the “bone method” and focuses on the strokes of the pencil or brush that enable the composition to breathe.

2nd Sketch of Jan. 1, 2022

I have posted a few of the sketches that grew out of this discovery, and I have finally begun watercolor sketching to see if I can transfer this “bone method” to the point of my brush. This first day of the New Year is proving to be fascinating to me.

More later. Thanks for reading.

Sunday Morning in the Redlands Hotel

Admiring and Sketching the Carnegie Library, and Reading . . .

But it helps me remember… I need to remember… Sometimes there’s so much beauty in the world, I feel like I can’t take it, and my heart is just going to cave in.

Quote from the film American Beauty

To pick up the scent of what would nearly finish us off if it were to confront us in the flesh, as danger, problem, temptation–this determines even our aesthetic “yes.” (“That is beautiful” is an affirmation. . . . The firm, mighty, solid, the life that rests squarely and sovereignly and conceals its strength–that is what “pleases“, i.e. corresponds to what one takes oneself to be.

Friedrich Nietzsche, quoted in Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche.

What a lovely Sunday morning! 46 degrees and sunny in downtown Palestine. Early this morning, Paula Cadle and I donned warm layers and stomped all over downtown, marveling at the low-angle sun carving out the facades of historic buildings lining the streets. The coffee took the chill out of the air as we walked and talked. Now, after breakfast, I hear the soft conversations of Sandi and Paula in the dining room of suite 207 as I sit in the bedroom and admire the lovely views of Sacred Heart out one window and the Carnegie Library out the other. The beautiful sunlight and the cold shadows of these historic architectural monuments just knocks the wind out of me, and I sketched a clumsy version of the Carnegie in my journal before settling into my Heidegger volume on Nietzsche. Aesthetics has always choked my own limited vocabulary, but what I’ve been reading from Heidegger, Nietzsche, Schiller and Kant recently makes me wish I could just lay aside the university and gallery responsibilities for a few weeks and months and try to put down in my own words just what exactly it is that art does to my soul.

Yesterday’s Art Walk is in the books, and we will hold our next one December 4. November 19 kicks off our Polar Express season at the Texas State Railroad here in Palestine. The Palestine-to-Rusk excursion train will turn into the Polar Express sensation. Sixty room reservations have already been made here at The Redlands Hotel and I’m preparing to bring out my own Christmas offerings for the new season approaching.

So far, I have framed five of my 5×7″ prints of watercolor Palestine trains in 8×10″ frames I sell at $50 each. We’ll be bringing out more work in the weeks ahead. As for Paula Cadle, she sold a ton of pottery the past couple of days, but is leaving behind a substantial display ripe for the picking! The Gallery has never been brighter in color than it is right now.

Sundays are quiet in downtown Palestine, and the respite is good for us. Later today we’ll had back to our Arlington homes, but for now we’re going to enjoy the quiet.

Thanks for reading.

I make art in order to discover.

I journal when I feel alone.

I blog to remind myself I am not alone.

Ring the Bells that Still Can Ring

Leonard Cohen, Pencil Drawing Created this Morning

There is a crack, a crack in everything. Thats how the light gets in.

Leonard Cohen, “Anthem”

The church bells from Sacred Heart across the street from the gallery woke me this morning, as they always do. But this Saturday morning was different. As I listened, I heard in my mind’s ear Leonard Cohen singing “Anthem”–“Ring the bells that still can ring . . . ” Tears came to my eyes. Really. I found myself wishing I had packed his book The Flame for my weeklong stay here in Palestine. The Flame is a collection of Cohen’s final writings and fragments he had attempted to publish before his death. Fortunately for us, his son gathered up all the work, edited it and wrote a precious Introduction. Now I wish I had it in hand to read today.

I feel thoroughly refreshed by Cohen’s rich collection of ideas this morning. For a number of days I’ve felt flat; ideas were not coming, and I expect them. When I stop experiencing such visitations, my world loses its color and flavor. I’m going to try now to explain what I mean by all this . . .

The Neo-Orthodox theologian Karl Barth discussed how the word of God becomes The Word through the act of proclamation. When I first read this, too much Fundamentalist ideology inherited from my youth was still clinging to me. I thought the Word of God was the King James Version of the Bible. Fortunately I grew beyond that in the ensuing years. I believe now that the Word, the Oracle, is potential at any moment of any day, through any avenue. Teaching for three decades, I always hoped that the words I put out would occasionally become a Word for that particular student who was lost, floundering. Every time I found out that something I said or wrote touched someone profoundly, I felt like sinking to my knees in prayer of genuine gratitude. I want everyone to know that sublime feeling of being touched by the reception of a Word.

This morning, Leonard did that to me by way of the church bells tolling. The visitation still leaves me trembling inside. I showered and breakfasted with only one thing in mind–getting downstairs to the Gallery and digging out supplies so I could render Leonard’s portrait in pencil. I did it. I framed it. I’m offering it through the Gallery now for $50. If no one purchases it, then I will continually enjoy its company as often as I look up to see it.

$50 Framed 8 x 10″ Pencil Drawing in The Gallery at Redlands

Sacred Heart Church seen from inside The Gallery at Redlands

To all my readers, I wish the best of Saturdays. As for myself I’m delighted that I’ll be staying here in Palestine till the middle of next week. Come by for a visit if you are in the area. And I hope that in the midst of today, a special Word will come your way. When it does, embrace it.

Thanks for reading.

I make art in order to discover.

I journal when I feel alone.

I blog to remind myself I am not alone.