Quavor

"The pain had been too pleasurable, the pleasure too painful; so that I feared that in time my mind would no longer be the thing I knew."

-Gene Wolfe- (Shadow & Claw)

"The world just seems to be on wheels ------ going so fast I can't see the spokes ---- and I like it." -Georgia O'Keefe-

There was a panic once in the very back of my mind. A small shadow that would only grow large in dreams, leaving me gasping for air and wild eyed awake. A whispering shadow, madder still that the character Mr. Depp plays in "Alice And Wonderland". A whisperer of feeling not words. How can a seventeen year old have anxieties about how time is so fleeting and would be gone, he would be old and it would all be over? There wouldn't ever be enough time to do what I wanted to do, I was getting old way to fast way to quick! I think I was a lot older then, then I am now. I look at old photos, friends have sent me, and I see old troubled eyes. The world was a heavy burden then. Emotions are real and have wait, they ether propel you or sink you like a rock.

My life is busy now, busy with the swirling of my imagination and dreams. I have even gotten over being worried that my dreams might not come true. A dream in itself has a equilibrium and a thrust, you don't always end up were you think it will take you but believe me it is alway interesting! I think dreams are kind of like hot air balloons, you can kind of guide them but don't think you are going to land the f*^%$cker on a dime!!! Oh I have my anxieties and at times it is a battle to keep a level head. Jesus said "True love casts out all fear" and that "My burden is light and my yoke isn't heavy." He was always getting at something deeper, down there in the bowels of your psyche. The question isn't one we want to answer, it isn't one that we really want to look at. A passing glance is just fine, a complaint here and a grumble there should do it. Yet do we really want to look at the real reason we refuse a light burden over a heavy one? Lets admit it: we like our heavy burdens, we like our fears, for then what would be left to talk about? The wether? Could we get off the ground with the buoy up of our dreams, with out panicking and letting all the air out just so we feel in control? We can't take heavy burdens with us, they are thoughts that anchor our craft to the ground. Be warned though, that emptiness you feel with out them will frighten you. You will feel godless........

Slingshotting my self into my work, panicked that for some reason not one piece would be worth a fart in the breeze and pushing on!!! Somehow it comes together when you are willing to just let it go.

"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............