mission accomplished ...

no. 31 ...

thirty-one studies in as many days - now, the next step ...

no. 30 ...

no. 29 ...

no. 28 ...

no. 27 ...

no. 26 ...

no. 25 ...

no. 24 ...

no. 23 ...

no. 22 ...

pirate radio and political foes ...

i don’t pretend to be knowledgeable in the area of movie reviews, but took the time last night to watch a movie as a light-hearted escape from life’s recent heavies - if only to hear some classic rock and a generation celebrating its emergence ...

it was a fun film with all the camp and corniness usually associated with a 60’s music flick [ie., the monkees, yellow submarine, etc] with one exception - the vindictiveness and mean-spirited exploits of a few individuals from the ‘establishment’ ...

prejudicial judgement wasn’t amusing then, and it appeared even more distasteful now ...

coincidentally, my reason for indulging myself was to escape similar rhetoric televised from the floor of the American House Senate where vicious attacks were being launched against heath care reform by a right-wing political machine comprised of the same mean-spirited, self interested, tight-assed bureaucrats that were represented in the movie ...

in both instances, hope survived and the promise of change was kept alive - but not without damage ...

the consequence of ugliness is enduring - for a generation of idealistic romantics and the individuals who try to keep the dreams of equality, fairness, and hope for a better future alive ...

I’m afraid President Obama’s target was substantially increased by his leadership in defeating the stranglehold that corporate america has on the public, and by doing so will have to circumnavigate a tidal wave of vindictive behavior - this was supposed to be his Waterloo ...

yesterday’s vote in Washington was liberating and historic, and as House Speaker Palossi indicated; the health care reform legislation that was passed will spawn a new era in entrepreneurship in America ...

no. 21 ...

no. 20 ...

no. 19 ...

no. 18 ...

no. 17 ...

The other day my friend Lally said some people are just wired differently - which is probably true and extremely benevolent of him ...

Unlike Michael, I haven't yet developed that level of virtue or tolerance regarding the media, popular culture, educational institutions, or politics ...

Unfortunately, I just think a lot of these naysayers about global warming, health care, and social reforms are just plain f'ing stupid - like the tea-party lady that grabbed the headlines yesterday by saying the dems are trying to trick the public by using ten dollar words like 'reconciliation' ...

give me a break - we're responsible for every word in that English dictionary - regardless of the number of syllables or her inability to pronounce it ...

The idiocy infuriates me - from the top down: whether its Vatican policies, political maneuvering, greed, corruption, disintegrating principles among bureaucracies or our educators that proliferate banality ...

Most of the time i can let it slide, but lately there seems to be a shock and awe surge of an unprecedented amount of stupidity every time I tune into the news, or pick up a magazine or newspaper - even the art reviews and essays seem to have withered to a readership of eighth graders that Bush so beneficently advocated by lowering the bar of educational standards ...

So when I hear someone say they're just wired differently, I also remember a Lally poem that states: 'we will no longer accept the unacceptable, or ignore the un-ignorable ...'

It really is time for a "Call to Intelligence" rather than embarrassment from accusations of elitism from the likes of Sarah Palin supporters ... After all, part of the American dream and responsibility of a human being was to strive to better ourselves through education that we might advance our culture - not to reduce everything to its lowest common denominator to benefit the unwilling ...

thanks for letting me share ...

no. 16 ...

no. 15 ...

specificity ...

i heard someone say that privacy is a modern invention - and it probably is, given that survival once depended on close contact with communal living ...

but solitude was also more available in the past ...

today it’s hard to escape the encroachment of civilization or the social expectations of our relationship with it ...

the deeper i’m involved with my work, the more i understand what i need to achieve certain goals and ambitions - a constant state of flux, indeed ...

though i’ve made measurable advancements over the last decade, i’m noticing a lack of specificity regarding explanations of what i do; and the more specific the objectives become, the more i require clarification ...

as an example; nature, improvisation, and expressionism seem to be key components to the pursuit of painting i find aesthetically pleasing; but i’m beginning to see them more as generalities supported by categories of more precise interests ...

nature, for instance, not only includes the environmental conditions of the seasons accompanied by the sensory impact of weather, flora, and fauna - but is also relates to being engulfed by the abundance of something other than human interaction. Where i work, there’s a limited period when the amplitude of distractions are drowned by nature’s dominance; providing longer and more frequent periods of consistent energy, plus sustainable transcendence for suitable concentration - both seem to imply the need for more solitude or a more controlled environment ...

improvisation on the other hand, once represented an expressive freedom from traditional form and tone structures - and though it still does - today i’m less interested in the cacophony of ‘free’ expression than i am with a refined selection of notes occasionally augmented by flurries of apparent chaos or random elements ...

truth is, i’ve always been interested in music sounding the way the mind thinks; a blend of simultaneous events ...

for me, the notion of expressionism has evolved from the early tenants of Greenberg’s treatise and examples through art, literature, and music over the past century to a fundamental component of communication for modern culture ...

once again, it becomes the method by which the mind appropriates the realities of modernity - but it doesn’t represent the simultaneous interaction of data coherently ...

this is why i need to be more specific ...

unseen ...

interesting how perception beyond normal ranges become classified under broad categories of intuition or paranormal; and in the case of the later, become scary because of accompanying myths ...

in the evolution of the species, walking upright must have looked a bit strange too ...

sometimes the simplest and most obvious explanations account for the most extraordinary events ...

gravity, for example, turned out to be a reasonably simple proposition that revolutionized life over the past three hundred years ...

what is it we are not seeing - between ourselves and the things we recognize - that accounts for all the activity that apparently goes on there ...

string theories, Castenada’s non-ordinary realities, auras, magnetic fields, energy flows, chi, solar winds ...

what accounts for the relative ease and speed of flight patterns of insects and birds while we exert so much dynamic thrust to oppose the same forces ...

it can’t all be gravity, unless opposition is the only course we investigate ...

in hindsight, most of history is riddled with examples of having to expend more force and resources than necessary to accomplish the task ...

i wonder if expedience is less effective without struggle ...

seeing, part 2 ...

an excerpt from the sreenplay by Peter Viertel - 

a fictionalized account of John Huston working on 

the "African Queen" in a movie entitled "White Hunter, Black Heart" - 

one of my favorite Clint Eastwood movies ...

"Well, what do you think, John?       

Not bad. But you're trying
to complicate it, Pete.        

Things are always good
if they're left simple.        

No, not always.        

Always. 

That's what creates truly
important art, is simplicity.        

John, there are no rules to art.        

There are hundreds of rules.
Hemingway understood that.        

That's why he always reduced life
to its simplest terms.      

Whether it's courage,
fear, impotence, death.        

People's lives just unfold, and things just
happen to them one thing after another.        

They were never bogged down
with that nonsense of subplot. . .        

. . .that we sweated over in the past.        

Stendhal understood that.
Flaubert. Tolstoy. Melville.        

Simplicity is what made them great." 

seeing ...

necessity is the mother of invention ...

abstraction [as a branch of phenomenology with painting being a by-product], begins to prepare us for understanding perceptual subtleties and changes - in this case vision ...

abstraction prepares us to adapt and delineate between: image identification, scale changes, and object placement in space - the same way perception of perspective was modified between prehistoric and high renaissance art, or even from medieval through renaissance; as understanding of spatial relationships, phenomena, and natural laws governing that consciousness became assimilated into civilization of the period ...

i believe we’re in the continuing process of evolving our visual acuity to distinguish the elements of what we now refer to as our sixth sense - abstract painting, at its best, prepares us for that transition ...

part of the condition during primitive painting and our development of perceptual skills was our inability to understand and articulate the things between things we recognized ...

i believe the problem prevails - who can deny those fleeting moments of seeing things that aren’t really there, or were there - but we lack the acuity to focus upon them, doubt our recollection, then deny seeing them in the first place ...

i doubt there’s as much space as we think there is ...

particulates ...

"One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between Man and Nature shall not be broken."

Leo Tolstoy

"The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane." Marcus Aurelius

apogee ...

there are some days, that just waking up is a thrill - i'm referring to that rush of gratitude and clarity that comes from recognition of that first breath and light as we transition from dreamland to waking reality ... maybe its the onset of spring or the path of Mars or unseen forces, but days like these - this time of the year, initiate this response with more frequency ...

and it's so good ...

most things come as a pleasure - with appreciative indifference colored with a sense of well being - as a witness and just participant ...

i used to spend a lot of money and time chasing what now comes for free ...

but this ain't sainthood because i still have a hair-trigger bite when i feel cornered or played ...

thankfully, it doesn't happen as much as it used to - probably a combination of people recognizing the signs and my unwillingness to play ...

either way, i'm learning a lot about soul-management over the years -

and lucky to have the chance ...

looking glass ...

"there's big money in cynicism - it's a career opportunity ..."

David Bowie

as night ...

its always been about -

diving, dying, climbing, and falling;

not being good enough ...

or being far enough away to not care,

too busy to think,

or deep enough in love to forget ...

dream no. 6 ...

"Never underestimate the power of early indoctrination".

Robert Hughes

links ...

"All human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together."

Jack Kerouac

images of what ?...

wish i knew - bubbles from the subconscious i guess ...

so what's up with the little drawings/paintings that have begun to debut during the month of March ?... no titles, no descriptions; nothing ?...

I've had a few inquiries ...

for anyone that knows me - i bounce from project to project since most things require drying time or objectivity which only distance provides ...

if i take a cig or coffee break, its usually in my office or drafting room where i have my notebooks, resource materials, and computers - and during the break i either jot down some notes or doodle about preoccupations ...

as an exercise, i decided to post the results of day-long doodles throughout the month to see how the nonchalance appears in quantity - there's not much forethought or direction since i have enough of that kind of discipline and respect for the vocation in other projects ...

i was thinking of including these in a slide show or animation accompanied by a piece of music I've been laboring over called "Nero's Melody", we'll see ...

doodling while fiddling ...

moving forward ...

little to say today except that things are moving forward on all fronts: the chapel designs, developing the foundation and resources, investigating studio options for a new season of painting production, art garb development, articles on modern art, scanning images for web page up-dates, commissions, gallery paintings, music composition, packing out-dated materials, meditation, reading, and daily administration ...

plus the smell of spring and change in the air ...

wunderland ...

i admit, I'm still a bit of a late night news junkie - at one point, about twenty years ago, i either had to rid myself of the TV or do an Elvis on it ... I've improved with a reasonable amount of discipline and sometimes by simply turning the volume off and watching the people - particularly the politicians caught in the crossfire of partisanship - some of these guys give me the creeps in the same way as when i had long hair in the 60's and would wonder into the wrong place or the wrong town ... my antennae picks up the weirdness, and its been a great survival tool ...

so i look at some of these pasty skinned, paunchy, snake-eyed, smiling through their teeth politicians who probably haven't had to do a hard days labor their entire life - and wonder how it is that they've become the representatives for the majority of people in this country ...

i know the real answers, but i can crank up the cynicism - especially when i feel I'm being deceived - and i do, even without the sound ...

so far, I've had a lifetime of depreciating faith in these guys - most of whom i see as manipulative scoundrels and the rest as evil, self-centered and hypocritical bigots; and of course, it's the later I'm compelled to appraise ... because someone once said: "know thy enemy" ... [i know how the rest of the quote reads, so please forgive my indulgence] ...

history affords us hindsight, so it's easier to understand at a distance what happened during McCarthyism, the civil rights, woman's rights, hippies, and the peace movement, etc. - but being there and living through it was more than a bit confusing and scary at times, to say the least ...

so it makes me wonder what "IT" is right now, as i watch these caricatures of responsible government weave us into some web of futile misinformation - for instance, what would happen to the G.O.P.'s chance at elections if they lose the support of campaign contributions from affiliations with the health care industry - they've already been publicly accused of "being a wholly owned subsidiary" - without denial i might add - and if they prolong passage of the health care reform bill till mid-term elections, they at least have a fighting chance to capture some money and seats while riling up angry mobs in charades of opposition to reform ...

what depth of mean-spirited-ness are these shifty characters capable of if:

* at a time when millions of people are in desperate need of assistance as a result of the mismanaged collapsing of businesses and economic institutions they oppose benefits based on political principle rather than moral responsibility ...

* they deny the passing of legislation that will benefit millions without health care ...

* they undermine, beyond political tolerance, the office of president and his authority by antagonizing people to demand seeing his birth certificate and question his citizenship ...

[not to mention disparagingly accusing him of belonging to one of the world's most devout and respected religions with negative implication] ...

what i see from their behavior is cruelty, heartlessness, veiled bigotry, and disrespect - and my question is how would people like this behave if they were desperate our in control ? - probably to an extreme we haven't yet experienced in this escalation of power struggles ...

my guess is that they see things like homelessness, unemployed and unemployable, the sick with pre-existing conditions, the rising obesity levels, increasing heart disease and diabetes, increase in high school drop-outs, and poverty in general that effects millions - not as symptomatic of a society in deterioration resulting from decades of special interest favoritism - but rather, they see an expendable liability - that if removed from statistics, they'll be back into profit margins - and the best way to obliterate liability is to not endorse entitlement programs, health care, and the humanities while beefing up security forces and unreasonable laws to protect themselves from the rising dissension ... sound familiar - who's fascist now? - and did the confederacy ever go away? - and do you know the real meaning of confederate? who's really in charge of the death squads? - i wonder ...

so in lieu of having an all out, sustainable war - which is good for business, population control, party line patriotism, and moral re-centering; they probably figure more covert tactics need to be applied - some of which you can catch on the evening news - even without the sound ...

lions and lambs ...

don't know where the expression came from; "in like a lion, out like a lamb", with reference to what are commonly called March winds here in the northeast - probably the same guy that said "April showers bring May flowers" - and i hope he's on Obama's environmental advisory board and prepared to make revisions about global weather maladjustments ...

anyway, since i was a kid I'd look forward to the 1st to see what Mom Nature would deliver - and more often than not, it brought cold howling winds out of the north - today was no exception - how does it do that, because it wasn't howling yesterday? Man, if i were pagan and less scientific, i could easily develop a mythology about this ensconced with gargoyles of Rush Limbaugh and other skeptics of climatology facts - but I'm not, so I'll just marvel in the synchronicity of it all ...

more on mammals: "only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and the rose grow without thorn" [martin amis - you can tell he's from Europe, because here in America we have stampedes, tea-baggers, and government regulated pesticides] ...

andrew ...

my son Andrew [by marriage not blood], turns twenty today ...

i use the 'blood' reference as a reason to justify our differences - because Lord knows, at twenty, i was everything my father expected me to be - yeah, right ...

he came to America from Paris with his mother when he was ten - leaving the only thing he knew up to that point; a culture that was more conducive to the subtleties and finery's of life, as European metropolitan existence is - a language, education, and social system that is unique even by European standards - and his friends, routines, and strains of his father's estrangement to join me and my family here in somewhat rural Pennsylvania ...

and though love flows with abundance from my family, and i live a relatively cultured life with his mother, it's still nothing similar to what is bred into his genetic code or even familiarity with urban living - it's still more like the wild west than Paris - even NYC, which has its own brand of urban aggressiveness and shallow history - all a bit intimidating and difficult to adjust to - but he embraced it with a 'can do' spirit that his mom instilled in him that i always admired ...

for me, at that time nearly fifty, i had no fathering skills - only vague, and often romanticized memories of growing up and management tools which were often viewed as overly assertive, even among my peers - but what i did have is the stability of my father's unwavering presence, direction, and support - and knowledge of what that generation of fathers did to prepare you for manhood ...

so you teach what you know ...

needless-to-say, my methodology was often met with resistance - which in my kingdom, moved from a dictatorship to democracy in a matter of months - quite an adjustment for all concerned - and a learning experience indeed ...

then we had 9/11, and him being French - he was alienated from peers as much as me being a hippie, musician, artist when i was growing up - only more so i suppose, because of the hypocrisies of the American dream of inclusion and the apparent 'zero tolerance' enforced by rednecks - you can always change your profession but not your blood ... fact is, i empathised and apologized and even thought about re-locating to my wife's origins of Scotland, but the task was greater than our will ...

anyway, we all managed through some horribly tough times; but my heart goes out to Andrew and so many like him of his generation and the challenges they have to adapt to ...

despite the difficulties of our union, i'm grateful for the enriching experiences - but i still go back to some of my father's advice; "if you work hard, long, and smart - things work out" ...

today, we still have disagreements as i expect we always will - and frankly, i'd be disappointed if we didn't - especially with him coming from such a rich heritage of debate ...

but i do realize how overwhelming life can be - i admire his victories but recognize that laurels make a bad foundation, and i understand the trials and disappointments ...

it's all a work in progress - the rest has to do with encouraging commitment, hard work, friendship, communication, spirituality, and dreams ...

a little love improves the journey ...

carpe diem and happiness everyday ...