"I take a walk, pretending I am a detached mind." -Czeslaw Milosz-

Nov. 30th 2009, 5 am. I turn on the lights and walk in, check the fire, stoke the fire and wander upstairs to make coffee. It is my opening day of work in the new studio that has been my ongoing project for the last three months. Everything is painted white; I have shelves, brush hangers, adjustable easels that hang from the ceiling, benches, a large 4x8 ft. work table, a drafting table and a heated, dust-free room for drying canvasses. I have light banks that I can raise and lower from ropes and pulleys suspended from the ceiling. I have a Bose sound system (Christmas gift from artist Harry Anderson) that has a wireless feed from my computer library and, after I attached wheels to the bottom of a small cabinet, I have a rolling paint palette table!

I look around, think to myself, "Now what the hell do I do?" I have had months to dream up everything I could accomplish if I had the space, time and resources and now it is all here………. No!!! I have had years to dream up large projects! I have worked outside, in tents, on kitchen tables and damp, spider-infested, basements; anywhere I could find a spot to set up an easel or table and draw. Now here it is spread out before me, my brain child. It is hard to explain the goodness I feel, the light I absorb and the hopes I have.

In seven months I will have my first one man gallery show in Brownsville, Nebraska. "Why Brownsville?" I get asked a lot. (Anything east of the Rockies doesn't really exist for most westerners until you hit New York; everything else is corn or wheat fields and generally boring.) The answer is that next to Brownsville, the Missouri River flows by in brown swirls and where a year and some months ago I beached my kayak on the shore. I got out and wondered into town with my dear friend John Johnston. We made friends, one of them being artist Harry Anderson. Harry liked the sketches I made of my kayak journey from Montana down the Mighty Mo and invited me to keep in touch with him after I finished my trip. He later offered me a gallery showing there in Brownsville, one show at the Lyceum Cafe' and Gallery and another in his own Anderson Galleries. He asked for fifty finished and framed images to be ready by July 2010. After these shows, I plan on entering juried art shows throughout the United States and working to get into permanent galleries. There is a lot to be done and my idea tank is overflowing, so much ready to burst forth that it is clogging up the gates!

Same world-different planets.......

Did your mother or father ever teach you about what being fair means? You wanted another piece of sweet goodness that was so beautifully rapped in that pretty rapper and you got an answer such as "Now honey if I give one more to you, there will not be enough to go around." Then you grew up............... Or did you? You might be able to think back to that explicit point in time when you got hit by the brick flying through the window! It hit you in the head and when you picked it up, in perplexed anguish, the message tied to it read "life isn't Fair"!!! And the bricks just kept coming. You get a job, work hard, your never late and never take smoke brakes and then the ass kisser who does as little as possible gets the promotion, raze, or the same raze as you! It goes on and on and it sucks.............

I have two very good friends, which are both artists and mentors to me in my own work. Their work, as well as their lives, differ vastly, you could say they live on two completely opposite planets from each other. They both work very hard and are equally opinionated on the subject of what art is or should be. I hold a large debt of gratitude to both of them for all the time, patients, and energy they have invested into my life. When I show them each my work, in turn, they pick out almost completely opposite pieces; that they believe are my best. They then strongly encourage me to "go that direction". I will admit, it can be confusing. They both have great points and equal passion in their admonishments. You must understand something here though; Artists like followers and worshipers. They have learned quicker than most that "life isn't Fair".

One of the first things a person learns being an artist is that "life isn't Fair" and "life is going to kick the shit out of your pride". This could be one of the big reasons so many art students find other occupations after graduation. Take the music industry as an example, there are those who study classical piano from the time they can walk. They go on to be a genius in school, playing anything that can carry a tune, they work for years on a piece that few if any one can comprehend or even listen to and and if they are lucky they sell that piece for the elevator. Then there is the punk kid who can't tune his own guitar to save his life and couldn't tell you were the key of G remotely could be found. He gets picked up by a talent scout, before he is even legal to drink, and is making millions. Not to mention playing for millions just because he is good looking, has tattoos, girls like him, and he is cool. People sing along, people line up for his next record, people know his face........... "Life isn't Fair" those who we see work the hardest we believe should get the most but we still don't want to listen to that chaps elevator music. Wright and wrong be damned!

One of my friends that I mentioned above does sculpture work that takes him two or three weeks to complete. My other friend also works in sculpture but spends, at times, years to complete a piece that sells for the same price as my first friends pieces do. Then there is the kid that ran around the ghetto who vandalized local businesses and then went on to try to sell his work in a few coffee shops. He becomes famous over night and now makes more that both my friends combined at the ripe age of thirty. He was a vandal and now he is a famous artist. We quantify that this kid should not have this honor and we also might say that he really isn't an artist at all; if of course we don't take to his style of work. (Other artists tend to be the quickest in this game to pin that tail on that donkey.) "It isn't fair to all those who have worked and worked at perfection their art for years." They say. Yet "Life isn't Fair"!

Now that we understand "Life Isn't Fair" maybe we can go on, quit wasting so much time complaining about who got what and put our efforts into loving. A wise man said a long time ago "Judge not lest thee be judged, in the same manner you judge you will be judged." I think we all know who that wise man was and I think we all know that we are all guilty. I personally want to try to be to busy with loving to make judgments on who deserves what!

Time goes by

The first winter snow came in last night. Moaning like a cat in heat through the crack in the window. My good friend "The Sailer" came home on Monday and I cornered him for first coffee in the morning, and then beer in the afternoon. The catching up of a year an'some. We told about girls, love lost or found and his kind eyes contrasted with his ugly mouth. We like to pretend we are tuff. Ben walks across the field ducking through old barbed wire fencing, hat cocked to one side. "I woke up with a pack-rat sitting on my pillow last night" he spits for exclamatory impact "I jumped out of bed and grabbed a bayonet. The little guy scurried into the corner and I pinned it there, then I yelled to Sarah "Sarrrrrahhhhh, bring meeeeee my longsword" she said "what?" My longsword I tell her and she pulls it down from were it lays on those elk horns above the table, ya know? She hands it to me and I stabbed the thing with it!" He spits again and we laugh. Ben wants to drag the old-pickup, a gift from the sailor's adopted mother, up to his place after it wouldn't start. I tell the sailor we should drag him into town, we laugh red faced thinking about it. "Ya! He couldn't get out could he?" "Nope!!!" I say smiling so my face hurt. We only drag him five miles down the road until he puts on the e-brake and we watch the tires smoke. We had forgotten about the e-brake. "You like that you sons-a-bitches?!!!" he yells as he jumps out in smoke and dust. We start laughing again. "It is good to be home!" the sailor gulps. I walk to the bank of the road to watch the larch trees turn a glowing green.

I have been painting dirty walls white and piling boxes with long forgotten things I don't remember. I hang my lights from the rafters and look at the pools they make, pools of electric glow waiting for me to wade into. I can't go there yet, I have to go through all the boxes and decide, what is worth hanging on to; such a grueling dusty business. "Hellow Sneeze, good to see ya again!" Am I an old man? Why do I have so many things that look old? Did I forget years inside the years and collected all these? They are other lives, from other places and not this earth I swear!!! Right now is the truth of the new paintings floating in the back of my mind. They are ghosts of the future and they haunt me now. Just as these boxes haunt me with the past.

This damn eternal now, I am lost in this and that; white walls, dust and dreams all of these prepare me for the Everest in my mind to climb or concur with the ghosts paintings in floating futures.

Safe from vertigo

A flash and it is gone; memory and captured moments are all that are left.  A story is being made, it is all we really are in the end.  The faded photos of my relatives that sit in the basement, pitched in with haphazard care, haunt me.  I can't look for to long.  I close the plastic lid and escape for the present sun light, away from the ghosts.......

My wonderful friend Garith Curtis, sculpture and philosopher told me something that finally made sense of art.  "People buy paintings, sculptures, and photos to hang on their wall to remind them of what is really important in life. It is a grounding point for most people."  I think he is right and I think that that reason makes better sense than all the rest of the jibbery about the importance of art.  We need a "grounding" for this modern world has up ended cultural gravity and has swept us into the atmosphere.  

Christina and Jesse Hafen are my friends and kindred spirits on the road of stories and myth.  I didn't know this until they hired me to photography their wedding last week end.  There are times when I feel I stare into the vortex of the past as I look at the future.  I see my photos in the eyes of my subject's grandchildren or grate grandchildren and I shiver knowing that what I am doing is a precious thing. It is sacred in the eyes of the future. My friends are beautiful. They shine in the light of loves combining power as a day spins around them, as only wedding days do.  It is painted in golds and grays as it rains out side and glows with in the doors under tungsten lights.  I feel everything in fast forward and I hold the images in my mind to keep me safe from vertigo.  They walk hand and hand through the spinning globe and I fallow, saving each step to remind the future "that this life really an't so bad!!!!" 

One Flesh........

"There is nothing that enters a man from outside which can defile him; but the things which come out of him, those are the things that defile a man."

                                                                                                        Mark 7:15

"Dispite all my rage I am still just a rat in a cage."

                                                                                           Billy Corgan 

  "In First Corinthians Paul tells wives to submit to their husbands" my friend says as he speaks over my other friends who are getting married, "but it's not what you think, it doesn't stop there!  The next verse down tells husbands to love their wives as Christ loved the church.  And you know how much Christ loved the church?  He died for her and that is what husbands are called to do for their wives............"  He grinned and stumbled as he spoke on about husbands duties to their wives, the submission of the wife was the crux and he seemed to pick up momentum and confidence as he consulted his notes after getting over the controversial topic of "submitting wives."  My mind wondered to Jesus, the subject I guess of the hole talk, and I thought about his death.  This is what a man was called to do for his wife?  It seems there was always so much talk about Jesus' death but his life seems to gather only passing glances from his followers, didn't Jesus also live for the church (his metaphoric bride?).  How did he live for her?  We all know how he died for her but how did he live?  Later my friend who conducted the ceremony got up and gave a toast to the bride and her new husband.  He told the bride how much he loved her but he was really glad that she would never live with them again and that he was happy that her husband was taking over what ever responsibilities he himself felt for her.  But that he also loved her.  My brother told him he was full of shit when he walked off the stage.  He hardly responded to the challenge and I felt sorry for him.  Helplessness was written there, the look of "what else could I do?"  The question was in his eyes as he looked at me and then looked away.  I saw him, in that moment, dying every day for his wife and his helpless rage at not being able to live for her.  All the retaliation that was given him now was a passive aggressive speech.  There is nothing to live for any more, only things to die for and I felt that crown of thorns pressing down.  

Sometime after falling......

"Some days I'm bursting at the seams 

  With all my half remembered dreams

  And then it shoots me down again.

  I feel the dampness as it creeps 

  I hear you coughing in your sleep

  Beneath a broken window pane.

  Tomorrow, girl, I'll by you chips

  A lolly-pop to stain your lips

  And it will all be right as rain.

   -This an't no love thats guiding me-"

                                                            -David Grey

  I get caught up in being caught up, nothing new about that is there? "But knowledge does not vanquish mystery, or obscure it's distant lights." Annie Dillard writes in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.  Just a soft reminder, tickle at the base of my spine to step back and breath again.  My friend Scott says that if you aren't sleeping well it is a good indication that something isn't right in your life, the balance if off.  Well.......... It could be a bomby hot house, noises in the night, or restless dogs wondering around hacking up hair balls too, but I think generally Mr. Marksberry is correct in his analyses.  I have a knot in the base of my neck which tells me I have some stress and that stress starts with a mind that is filling up and over flowing with burdens not mine to carry.  Yet "knowledge does not vanquish mystery" and I wonder why I didn't see it coming and check my self.  All the warning lights were flashing weeks ago, the neon lights flashing through my brain cells "step back, step back"! Jesus lead a great example when he would slip away, tell no one, and disappear from his friends to find solitude, prayer, and silence. Are we that much greater to not need this as well?  I go sleepless nights of crazed drifting, morning hazes, reactionary actions, and unthought of conversations until I become so dissatisfied with my present state of mind that I collapse in frayed exhaustion. Then I look up. Where does hope come from? I have some urge for quantity and immediacy that is always at war with spirit and soul.  I become a wild eyed friend and a manic companion to any new acquaintance that happens to cross my path.  I want to sell the shop and not the trinket, squeeze the balloon before watching it rise.  I ask my self how many times must I be the "Prodigal Son" returning home, yet it doesn't matter really and I don't know.  It is just nice to get home again............ 

Gravity

"Is this what it's like, I thought then, and think now: a little blood here, a chomp there, and still we live, trampling the grass? Must everything whole be nibbled?"

                                                                                                                       -Annie Dillard

  On account of life and deeds, color and texture, sexuality and religion I am a tumble weed of both desire and constraint.  As one writer wrote about his life (and I paraphrase): "There I was, successful, famous, and rich only to find my self the next day raving mad!"  When desire takes her hand and holds me too close the scales shift to that side of life and off I go!  And when they shift to guilt and worry, sliding to far to constrain, I choke on a noose of my own making "Their freedom has now become their bondage." Brett said this week end.  I just finished two days with the delightful Mr. and Mrs. Townson.  I awoke in their "off the grid" house in the West Kootenia late last Saturday morning to wander up stairs with my guitar. "Dodging bullets in the sun, I hope that was the last one" Brett howls to a riff I start playing.  A new song is born as we pull secrets from the air about a man caught in something too big to handle.  The morning turns into afternoon and we hunt the scrap yard near the shop for a surface to paint on.  House paint gets dribbled and thrown, flexed and suspended before contact, a collaboration of wills and friendships. Brett and I paint together just for the hell of it, just to see if we can bend like reeds in the same wind.  These images are from those days. Just a grab at a time and a glance of a memory.  We talked exhausted into the night about our feelings on religion, that oh so delicate balance between relativity and cramped security: what parts of life are gravity and what parts are atoms and beyond!  Our basic conclusion, in case you are just dying to know and believe that at least one of us must be ingenious enough to figure it all out, is simply this: "somethings are basic truths, such as gravity, yet moral law can't be applied to life like say "gravity" is, it comes down to love and hate, "to hate evil and love good" yet we are easily fools for evil that is good and good that is evil.  This means it is a day to day walk in grace, mercy, love, and repentance but most of all love. Some how things are better that way.  And we are all crazed artist's with our hair flying, our desire flinging and our constraint held in the tensions of gravity.

I had the great honor to be apart of photographing 

two very dear friends of mine this last Friday evening.

Leslie and Todd have always been two people that 

I have loved deeply and have admired greatly.

Their loving personalities have reached out to all

who have come in contact with them and have given

me more smiles and laughs than I can count!  They

are engaged to be married this August and asked my 

friend Scott and I to photograph their engagement as

well as their wedding.  It saddened me greatly to 

leave the wedding photography to my good friend

Scott but I was lucky enough to be able to be apart of

their engagement photos.

Here is the art work I was able to do, just a try, just

a catch of the fire that surrounds their love for each

other.  I have to say that their commitment, one for the other,                                                     

goes beyond words and I believe it goes beyond

time, it has made my life better, and I believe it has 

and will continue to make this world we live in shine

deeper with the glory of God.

Thank you Todd and Leslie, thank you for being my 

friends, thank you for the love you share and 

thank you for being who you are.

The Cheshire Cat

"For some reason it has not yet trickled down to the man on the street that some physicists now are a bunch of wild-eyed, raving mystics.  For they have perfected their instruments and methods just enough to whisk away the crucial veil, and what stands revealed is the Cheshire cat's grin."

                   -Annie Dillard

--Here is to Ben......

"The Greatest Seduction"

"it was always without pretensions of loving or being loved, although always in the hope of finding something that resembled love, but without the problems of love."   -Gabriel Garcia Marquez  (Love in the time of Cholera)

  My cell phone doesn't work here; not that I answer it very often any way.  I can hear the river rolling outside and see the wet stone walkway flowing under the glowing branches of the birch as it leads to the front door.  I can feel the presents of Stryker Peak towering over my right shoulder and unseen through house and trees.  I love this place, I love it because I feel lonely here, I feel like it should to be shared with some one; that it needs to be shared.  I like this feeling because it is such a contrast from other parts of my life. (I too find my self filling my life with mediocre love and loving.  A safe love, a distant love, a survival love.)  I also feel like reading my Bible, now that I am here, and praying to a whispering God.

Feel it!  Do you?  The muse is here, it is buried deep under the compost of the dark forest, close to the winds of the peaks.  I feel it in wet morning light and breezes of all the past lover's touches.  I don't know what it means to be an artist, I am simply me.  If envisioned from the outside I see my self as silly.  Yet I feel it in some places and others it is memory that keeps me working, memory of all that which came before, with what ever this is that feeds the monster.  What is it that inspires you?  What is it; that cause and effect that swings your Newton's Cradle?  That blows holes in the top of your head and off you stumble as your own personal disco ball!  What do you think an artist feels like before he or she does something beautiful?  I try to fill my heart with all that is given, when it is give, and to take it with me as I go.  It isn't every where, you got to take coals and keep them bright and stoke the fire when needs be.  Art is never a wast of time, there is to much ugliness in this world of man, those of us who "can" have a responsibility to bring as much  light and beauty into the world as possible.  So stoke the fire, I say!  Stoke it for the bombs that are falling and the blood that is running, for the poisons leaching into the rivers, for the mother that cries, for the addict with wasted vanes and the little children abused.  It isn't enough to talk.

Art and Friendship

This is the past, frozen in imagery like the subject of many of the images.  Today was summertime with it's puffy clouds and hot sunshine marked off by the lines of cool shade. There are still pieces of springtime left though the melting of these pictures is past, at least in the low country.  It has been a slow summer in coming, just as a slow winter in leaving.  A night ago I a woke with a thin layer of ice on the puddles outside the door.

  These images were taken on two different outings with two artist friends of mine who are constant at keeping me in social contact when I am locked away with ideas and creation.  It was only six weeks ago; an age ago now that the sun has warmed the land to green.  I love their company, their creativity and forceful wit as I love these new warmer days.  

"I have often noticed that these things, which obsess me, neither bother nor impress other people even slightly."

                                                                                                                                                                                     Anne Dillard

Some one has pushed auto-pilot, with out asking me, and this is my machine damn-it!  I know the brain is a muscle and not a jelly suspended in plaster holding two video cameras recording the world and erasing at random.  I know this........  Well, summer is here and with it's long days spent out side, in the sun, with the makings of money and the coming after-math of exhaustion.  I have dirt sinking into the pores of my hands.  I am a gardener this summer, as I have been for the past two summers, and like the past two summers I have found I live in polar opposites from one part of the year to the next.  Winter is at a sharp right angle to summer living; I don't know if this is mentally healthy.  I am guessing that it isn't, for any time you feel like you are on an upper level of the old Nintendo video game Tetras it is time to re-orientate and remember gravity!  It is summer time!!!  It is for a celebration of this crazy place - all the balloons are coming out bursting and then being reborn to just burst once again!  To sleep doesn't seem needed, there is just to much to do and every one is smiling.  I can't rip my self from my brother porch in the evenings, the flowers are still running colors in my mind, as we sip cold beer and watch the mountains play a slide show of shadows.  An artist must be still for a time, must be the sponge before the spout, everything the artist experiences becomes the expression and I believe all this.  Where the monkey and the wrench and the gears get put in the same room and start punching holes in the walls of my head is the apex between my inspiration and my self awareness. 

  I haven't done much for art in two weeks, or three.  I have to reming my self to not feel a certain nagging guilt or paranoia that once the engine cools it will never start again. "Are you avoiding your art?" a friend of mine asked me as she walked up to the porch last night.  It was me, Ben, beer, and the shadows on the mountains.  I laughed, it is all a person can do sometimes, when you just don't have an answer for the riddle.  So I sit there letting the tidal waves build inside me; I want big canvass, fresh smooth and ready to dance the color; fined form, in value, and it's speech!  I want to bury my head in Prussian Blue and breath Crimson!  I want to cut out my heart and use it as a stencil to paint an arrow to You!!!!!!!!!!!!  Do you get the point?  I don't have the canvass, the paints still are covered in caps and lid and all that remains is to sit on the porch and laugh with Ben.  It is summer time, the flowers are our party favors and we smile as if it had always been this way! 

Is it love?

"If sex is about connection, what happens when everybody is connected with every body else?"  -Rob Bell

I will put you on trial now, I will look you in the eyes and if you look away you might be subject to doubt.  I am going to decide now if you are right or you are wrong, I will ask you some questions that have one answer; is it yes or is it no.  These are important questions I ask you, for they will tell me if you are to be loved and admired or if you are to be pitied and avoided.  I know you do not wish to be on the outside, you desire to be with us even if you will not admit it.  Every one wants to be with some one else, they want to feel apart of something, something greater than themselves, and they want to believe they have found the rarest of treasures; in relationship, in thought, in belief, and in truth.  Don't you want to hold that treasure, it is important that you do, it is important to me; so just answer yes or no.

 

  Have you ever felt this way? Have you ever felt you are on trial?  That one miss step would land you in the shitter trying to keep your head up.  All you want to do is connect, make friends, laugh and be happy, you wonder why you have to prove your self to any one!  Much less those who call them selves your friends but that isn't life is it?  I believe two things are worth while, to strive for in this life, and the rest is a wast of time: One is doing art and all the things that make it possible, Two is loving each other and finding better, more efficient and deeper ways to do that.  Like I said "the rest is a waist of time."

"The Virgin"

   "Purity is one of the two most attractive ideas the human race knows.  The other is perfection.  Purity is absence, perfection is fullness.

-Purity seeks to eliminate inessentials.

-I am as attracted to purity as the next guy. But it must not happen here."

                                                Annie Dillard

                                            (Living by Fiction)

I like Dillard's thoughts on the abstract art movement, though I honor the "Minimalist" and would love to capture the bare essentials of what makes art art as they did and are still doing.  To get rid of the clutter that is only skin deep and go strait for the heart of your subject is, I believe, every good artist purgative. I am working very hard to express an idea faster and with greater impact with every piece that I work on.  Simple? Yes!  But for the complicated mind it can be a challenge of a life time.  It takes a quieter mind than I have most days and I am beginning to believe a much more advanced one than I am equipped with at the moment.  But I press on!  

  We are complicated beings, you and me, just ask a local physician and he will give you the whole nine yards on just how complicated.  The mind will make a person ill, the mold in the basement or the tuna sandwich he ate the other day.  It could be all of the above or it could be something to do with the changes of the weather!  Who knows; so take these pills and hopefully you will feel better before they start making you sick!  So I ask you to try on simplicity for a hat and go walking around in the buff!  Not only does your mind not want to cooperate but you will get warning sines from you body that you are surely going to freeze to death very soon!  So it works in art, if you strip it down to the bare essentials what do you have?  A pure white canvas?  I am not sure but I am sure that what Dillard talks about with the true pure art is in fact very true; "Purity" can't be the whole aim of the artist.

I need a name for this one!

 I need a name for this piece.  It will be in my next up and coming show in January 2010.

  I have trouble deciding on names, sometimes, for my work, and would love to have some help from my friends.  If you have a creative name go to "comments" at the bottom of this blog and send the name you think it should have to me.  The name I like the most I will put on the image and give the winner something VERY nice! 

Is the sky falling?

"Life, thought the naked man, was a hell, with rare moments recalling some ancient paradise."

-Italo Calvino

Shapes and patterns, colors and contrasts, line and composition, hard edge and bleed out, which one to choose at any given moment that will make the image powerful or good fire starter for the little red stove sizzling in the corner.  "Photography is ariel acrobatics of the art world."  I told my dear friend and fellow photographer as we sat looking over our last wedding we photographed together.  When you are looking for art in modern moving life, capturing the second or tenth of a second or a moment that says a life time, you have to have the reflexes of the juggler, the humor of the clown, and the judgement of  the tight rope walker.  This......... isn't the "second" though, this is the flowing memory and the feeling of the moment combined in a meditation.  It is slow and ancient compared to photography; an old man watching the Olympic swimmers.  Henri Cartier-Bresson writes about the differences between painting/drawing and photography, for he was both a photographer and painter, his words are beautiful and souring as he speaks of "the artist spirit" verses "the artist's medium".  There are things I can capture with a paint brush that I can't capture with a camera and vise-versa with photographs.  "Painting is self-discovery," Jackson Pollock said. "Every good artist paints what he is."  Today's thought patterns towards art, I am speaking of the over all mass of civilization, tents to take of the view proposed by the "Dada" artists of the twenties and thirties.  Everything is art and in the same token nothing is art, this thought leaves the every day man in a comfortable place were he can say "art is what I like to be art".  For the uneducated majority what they like and call art is what is recognizable and doesn't make them feel insecure by not being able to understand the why behind the meaning that the artist is trying to convey.  We are a civilization of fast food, fast meanings, and fast fixes.  

What I am giving you, above, is nether a fix, an answer or a problem.  It is a question, a question that leads into more questions.  It isn't relativism and it isn't altruism, it maybe both and maybe nether and I don't care.  My friend and art mentor suggested that it be called "Our Father is Watching", I thought it was a good title.  I think you would know what he means by this if you have walked the streets of Manila in the Philippines, or even watch the five o'clock news with out looking at it as the new HBO block buster!

"La Cirque'"

"Now I swallowed it all and could never be full,

Now they call me a fool for leaving"

-Project 86

The snow reflexed the sky like an atom bomb bursting or perhaps walking into heaven for the first time.  I have to wonder if you would know the difference, if there would be a change from one brightness to the next?  Everything melted and ran to the still clear river as it molds under the bridge.  The dogs bounced up the road dragging sticks and stopping at exact moments to make yellow snow.

There has been times when I have wondered about joy and how truth connects with happiness.  I have been reading a couple novels by Thomas Disch who makes life out to be pointless and all of man's dramas nothing but comic no matter how gory!  He is a fantastic writer!  The only problem is is that he too believable and can put a dark cloud in a spotless day if you aren't careful.  I was thinking about him as I walked up the melting road blanketed with sun.  Poncho, my dog, was being even more of a clown than he normally is; running from one soft snow berm to the next and leaping full speed into the snow where he would stick!  Then he would roll over, out of his hole, yip and run to the next bank to do the same thing all over again! I compared his shear joy to Disch's depression and had to wonder if he would have been as likely to take the same point of view if he had owned a red heeler/Australian shepherd. You can't help feel the joy of life when you watch this crazy eyed furball bounce through life with happiness and trust that I love him.  He can bounce from snow bank to snow bank, he knows he is taken care of, he doesn't have to worry about a thing.  I wonder if we knew we were taken care of, if we could be clowns for a day or for the rest of our lives.  But wouldn't that be silly?

"This New Age"

"Standing on the rock, as if fleeing from her own imprisoned arm, she let out a cry that sounded like: It's the octopus! The octopus is torturing me!"

     -Italo Calvino

  Welcome to "The New Age", welcome to today, welcome to The News that will greet you this morning on the T.V.; on the radio to work, on your bosses face and filtered into the Baloney of your sandwich.  Welcome to your life, here and now; what is it that you believe or how much can you believe before all turns into one of those dying stars seen through the Hubbell Telescope.  Everything is moving faster(but not fast enough for us to slow down), the volume on the commercials are getting a little louder, our capacity to tune out stronger and the blizzard of ideas a little thicker. What is beautiful is threatening, what is uncluttered is suspect, what is quiet is annoying and we pray that what is next can stimulate what is left.  Welcome to our "The New Age", welcome to today, welcome to a smile that was left to you for just such an accession.

waiting for that something special.

 Today is a wedding day.  My buddy Scott and I are the honored photo crew of a friend who has put her trust in us to capture her dream day.  I awoke at five this morning with my stomach rolling like the Atlantic in December.  I have never seemed to get over the nerves, though I have shot many many weddings.  So much has to happen in just a few hours, sometimes seconds!  I have to be in the right places at the right time and get the shot, because there is no going back!  I have to think about batteries, light gear, cards, communication, time, weather and on down the road the list twists.  No matter how much I tell my self I have got everything in a strait line, I am balancing the fence and have done it so often that I don't need to think about it.  I am about ready to do cart wheels on the line  but who cares, I know how to do it so why let my head get out of control?  Well, I thought of this at five this morning as I watch the shadows play on the ceiling, and I asked the same question.  "Why do I feel this way, it makes no sense."  Yet, fear rarely does make sense, "what ifs" are just the next turn in the road and you can take the turn or run back yelling "I am not prepared" just as you get shoved back the way you came.  

  This painting I angiushed over most of the weeks, it is call "The Flowers Fade".  I felt like a fading flower when I was doing it.  It exhausted me and I wondered where my worry comes in to this piece.  Where are the nerves.........

A need for repentance.

"So I perceived that nothing is better than that a man should rejoice in his own works, for that is his heritage.  For who can bring him to see what will happen after him?"

                                Prov. 3:22

What is good enough to be happy?  I ask my self as I look at my work, I look at my life and I think about my ego.  I have drank to much this past week, at nights and sometimes on the afternoon.  Other than model photos, for new ideas, I have done little.  My ambition has been low and winter has beaten spring out one more time!  I haven't really been all that joyful and I have grasped for that happiness I have seen come out in paint and line.  My buddy Bruce paints landscapes that would light up Willy Wonka's chocolate factory.  They make me laugh, full and playful!  They dance with color and are a piece of heaven with no shadows.  He told me he doesn't look for reality when he paints he lets the painting take him to a place of peace and joy in his heart first and then lays down color.  I love that about him, I love that about his works.  Each piece that B. does brings a light and happiness into his life and that is enough for him.  He doesn't have to show off his work, he will if you ask him, but you wouldn't even know he painted (seriously painted) unless you spent hours with him.  For his paintings were never made for you, they were never made to fill his ego or for people to pat him on the back to fill their egos by "knowing a great artist".  No!!!  They were made for his own joy and the smile in his soul.  GOD!!!  Would you help me paint that way?

  I don't believe it is the journey that we are on that counts, I believe it is how we approach that journey.