logos, study ...

drawing study ...

logos ...4-29 ...

logos ...4-28 ...

logos ...4-27 ...

logos ...4-25 ...

studio visit ... three ...

Art Garb © Shoes + Aquarium, progress ...

Logos, progress ...

once in a lifetime ...

1970 ...

I’ve been mixing down “Earth Song”; a haunting little two track melody i wrote ten years ago and later added sixteen tracks of guitar improv with Erik Cartwright ...

the composition is a three minute cycle that transforms seven times to make a twenty-one minute arrangement ...

we did eight takes of one channel each while only listening to the original melody ... individual ‘takes’ had portions of bliss, but playback of all eighteen produces a wonderfully cacophonous blend of creative energy and improvisational discourse - akin to Stravinsky and Hendrix tripping to the “Rite of Spring” ...

whatever it turned out to be - it was fun ...

i had just set up a music studio in the newly renovated barn in 2000; Erik was back from a national tour of tech’ing with the Allman Brothers Band - living up-river in Marshall’s Creek, and it would turn out to be one of the last times we would make music together before he hit the road again ... until fate reveals ...

Erik was two years older when i met him in a garage-band-type jam when i was seventeen - unknown to me at the time, he’d already achieved regional legendary status as a guitarist with major ‘chops’ - from Hendrix and Clapton, to Airplane and Jeff Beck ... all i knew is he had an ear, intuition, and hit notes that resonated to my soul ...

first time i saw him jam publicly was in ’69 with G.E.Smith - [another Stroudsburg musician who went on to Hall + Oates, SNL, and Dylan] at a free jam-fest doing some killer blues - without a bass player, mmm ...

we also shared some mutual O.C.D. behavior around our equipment - an elitism for vintage quality, reconfiguring electronics to maximize tone and volume, and an innate ability to play off each other in a jam - plenty of reason to form a band - so in 1970, we did ...

both of us had pretty much outgrown our respective ‘circuits’ by that time and were ready to spread our wings to go on the road - we were ripe for it - but the times, they were a changin’;

Nixon, Viet Nam, rednecks, and stuff that didn’t sound like rock n’ roll anymore ...

we had a renegade inclination toward loud jam-band music which was losing popularity - but managed to survive until it was time to decide to jump in all the way or wade along the edges ...

music and travel didn’t leave enough time for art so we said our existential goodbyes as i went off to college and Erik on to music ...

He did a stint at Berkley, played some well known Boston bands, then went on to Foghat ...

twenty years passed till we played again - it was like we never stopped ...

we both have a wide-ranging repertoire of improvisational skills that cross a lot of dialects - but more importantly in a jam, we share an intuition that i’ve never found in anyone else ...

others have said the same; and if it wasn’t for Erik, i doubt that i would have found the level of joy and appreciation of music ...

as we usually say;

“Take care man, we’ll do this again sometime” ...

1992 ...

1997 ...

homage ...

Think of it as a birthday of a close, personal friend - one who has stuck by you every day of your life ... What can be done to show appreciation ...

I've included a mix version of "Earth Song" ... listen ...

and an excerpt from a piece by the poet Janice Johnston Howie ...

EARTH SONG

Relentless ... awesome,

trudging onward, an invincible monster,

vast and unseizable.

Almost mocking, but actually indifferent

for nothing we do impacts its trajectory at all.

On and on, with or without us,

throughout anything ... despite everything ...

la "machine infemale"

of which nothing can halt the serene and sinister momentum.

It orbits a cycle, then pausing, resolves ... comfortably,

with a defeatism that is not immediately, if ever, apparent.

And we, poor, deluded, pompous creatures,

with age and erosion, finally shrug in resignation,

somehow relieved by a return of the familiar,

profoundly grateful for a reprieve,

throw up our hands, raise our eyes to the heavens and sigh ...

"Ah well ... what can you do?"

as, dispassionately, the cycle mutates a little, and recurs.

Listen ... here it comes again ... on and on and round and round,

lost in the concentric circles of Dante's Hell,

the stupefying maze of Camus' Amsterdam canals,

where ring upon ring of muddy waters lurk below murky skies ...

till we have ... gratefully ... no clear idea of beginning nor end ...

as the familiar spirographs and distorts geometrically -

or takes fearful, quantum leaps into the unimaginable,

as illusions of 'control' and 'normality' recede ...

imperceptibly ...

as if they had ever been anything more than a dream.

[J.J.Howie © 2003]

partially inspired by the music of Earth Song

studio visit ... two ...

peeling, scraping, and sanding ...

manicured lawn ...

pretty much a repeat of yesterday's activities except that i managed to dig into a few panels that needed to be scraped and sanded in preparation for another layer ...

finally was able to get a rough mix of "Earth Song" for tomorrow's Earth Day debut - still needs a lot of work, but you have to start somewhere ...

gessoed eight new panels, worked on "Logos", did some critical writing, and manicured the lawn - second time already this year - so strange ...

studio visit ... one ...

white-washing "Logos" - gessoing new panels ...

mixing demo of "Earth Song" - developing "Chapel" models ...

mildly frustrating, but a beautiful spring day - didn't get much time outside and didn't really paint - spent the majority of the day jumping from one thing to another - kind of like a ceremonial dance before battle; - mixing color, cleaning brushes, planning maximum efficiency - gessoing new panels to paint on ...

i worked on "Logos", but it's at a point where i'm eliminating unnecessary elements and taking the surface back to white - still a lot of concern about textures, brush flow, and consistency of paint - but just white on white ...

in between i was pipe-lining potential projects with phone calls, emails, and promotional mailings ... thinking about publishing a book - what would i enjoy reading ...

the major challenges came while things were drying - trying to mix down eighteen tracks of material i recorded with Erik Cartwright ten years ago [formerly with Foghat, and a dear friend since we were teenagers] - i avoided the project because its such a menacing task - 16 of the 18 tracks are he and i improvising on guitars for more than twenty minutes and trying to reduce it to a seven minute piece is like trying to fit the Libraries of Alexandria into a backpack ...

to offset the frustration and gain some perspective, i dremmeled my way through styrofoam working on the "Chapel" prototypes, which i blogged about a while ago ...

so that was today, and tomorrow i get one step closer to painting the 15' x 7' piece ...

uneasy feelings ...

Maybe its just the weather - or the accumulation of fragmented thoughts - or the residuals of seeing and hearing too much news and toxic displays of emotion during the health care reform debate - or maybe its the unfiltered microwave of cell phones carrying floods of pleas and cries of desperation or rage from the millions just trying to get through their day ...

or Russert's interview with Bill Clinton who says there are huge populations of people that have to walk five miles just to get a jug of clean water ...

I’m suspicious of blue skies and mild weather during seasonal transitions since 9/11 ...

Or maybe its just the dust of earth’s blood or hell settling to the ground after the eruptions in Iceland ...

or the escalation of what Thomas Moore calls ‘psychological modernism’ in “Care of the Soul”: an adjustment disorder - ‘an uncritical acceptance of values in the modern world’ ...

or shifting polarities - the inverse relationship between information and wisdom or prevailing axioms of indifference ...

What is that LHC Collider in the suburbs of Geneva doing these days ...?

truck art ...

Check out this link: Pakistan's truck art ...

marble ...

marble + art ...

The previous entry addressed gaps between intention and experience, engagement, detachment, plus active vs. passive perceptual experience ...

To further illustrate those ideas, i recognized points worth mentioning that parallel some difficulties with understanding abstraction ...

I’m not surprised that my work is often appreciated for different reasons than intended - a discrepancy caused by my emphasis on particular stages of the object's development ...

I mutilate my paintings ...

but i take great care to facilitate the inspired expressions, apply paint with methods that best articulate the ideas, and blend appropriate colors, materials, and images to maintain conceptual continuity ...

Then i proceed to aggressively obliterate everything that doesn’t seem essential to the original idea or inspiration by over-painting or eliminating it - not in an act of anger, but with an expressionistic impatience for irrelevance - only the best survives ...

I save the ‘good’ parts by applying a resist to preserve it ...

then continue to carefully add another painting over the top - peeling away the resist - analyzing the results, sanding and scraping the surface to blend elements, textures, and color ...

this process continues over and over until a unified balance is achieved between surface appearance, motivations, concept, and energy ...

Nature is my source of inspiration + improvisational expression is the idiom ...

Despite the brutality, force, and effort that goes into the production, i’m acutely aware of the fact that they are only thin veils of paint combined that bring the inspirations into the realm of reality ...

a delicate balance which i treat with utmost care and respect prior to final presentation; by smoothing, polishing, and waxing the object - and more recently applying a thick epoxy resin to entomb the content as though it were amber ...

Rather than recognizing the causality of creative and destructive forces in the development of a piece, viewers are more immediately drawn to its unique, mysterious, and appealing appearance - and that’s fine, except that it’s an object of art intending to communicate an idea:

• what does it mean...
• how was it made ...
• what school of thought encouraged it ...

Unfortunately, pedestrian habits numb curiosity; pretty, ugly, acceptable, tolerant, interesting, shocking, etc, seem to be the most common filters of engagement ...

Does it really matter if the work addresses [among other ideas]; the causality of nature, expressionism as a modern language, and our perceptual capabilities among vast fields of information - that it never relies on the immediacy of earlier abstract expressionism and that conceptual clarity is no more of a singular issue than pluralism is duplicitous - that simultaneity and specific energy quantifies reality ...

probably not - but it’s there to be read for anyone with that predisposition ...

Though i understand the scheduling disruptions as a result of Iceland’s eruptions - there’s a beautifully creative process occurring as a result ...

The Eyjafjallajokull (ay-yah-FYAH'-plah-yer-kuh-duhl) glacial volcano ... its magma is melting and blending rock at temperatures with force we rarely witness - marble is being created ...

Marble is admired for its durability, patterns, and colors, but its recipes also deserve appreciation. Shifts in the earth’s crust - tectonic plates - cause the seepage of molten rock to combine with tremendous pressure which melts limestone into large crystals creating marble - mixing with clays and other minerals produces varieties of color while their cooling rates and pressure produce patterns ... it is a metamorphic substance created by distilling and fusing conglomerates - it is a whole greater than the sum of its parts - including the unseen forces of nature and aesthetic beauty ...

reverberations ...

"The School of Athens", 1510, Raphael ... only 500 years ago ...

There’s often a gap between intention and experience -

especially with unconventional expressions like abstraction or conceptual art ...

It’s a language under continuous development and part of the creative challenge of advancing communication amid new and complex discoveries governing our realities ... [simple things like dark energy and matter occupying more than 90% of the known universe ...]

Gaps of understanding usually occur from lack of familiarity with subject material - on behalf of the artist and audience ...

In this age of highly specialized knowledge, that gap widens if there’s a reluctance from the audience to increase their scope and depth of experiencing new art and literacy of current events ...

An artist’s resistance to bridge communication gaps adds to the problem ...

There’s a limit to how many clues can be incorporated to make a work accessible without compromising the integrity of invention ... [similar to the building and safety requirements of architecture that limit the designer’s capacity to be innovative] ...

But there may also be a limit to the amount of ‘newness’ a human brain is willing to assimilate - which causes detachment rather than engagement in learning experiences ...

If communicating to the audience with conventional codes becomes the primary goal of the artist and inventor, then innovation is lost to commonality and art either becomes mediocre or mundane decoration ...

In the antiquities of Greece and Rome, statues and frescoes were a method of educating a larger population to deities, myths, and reason; to the heroics of victory and the horrors of defeat - to the virtues of ethics and the perils of vice - and as the artists’ knowledge increased with their familiarity of the subject, so did their contribution to innovation, style, and philosophy ...

And though we view this work today as traditional, thousands of years ago it was at the forefront of discovery ...

The continuity of art illustrating the advancements of philosophy and science remained unbroken to the twentieth century with a few interruptions imposed by dogma, war, and political repudiation ...

Today however, when broad public consensus rejects the inventions of perceptual development and new art in favor of nostalgia and traditional forms, the concern seems more like a cultural phenomenon than a regulatory or circumstantial abatement ...

Embracing the past suggests rejection of the future ... [uncertainty and fear cause insecurity - they raise doubt in our abilities - and doubt comes from a lack of knowledgeable options ...]

Education lies at the heart of the problem, and will probably be seen to cause more wide-spread civil disruption if trends continue ...

Class separation, as a result of economics, is inevitable but continuity of education is the bonding agent within a civilized society; not just the laws that govern, or the courtesies of civility, or the aspirations of ideals ... affordability is no excuse for acceptability in a world of libraries and information access ...

Education is the foundation for order, acceptance, and invention necessary for global competitiveness and survival - and the integration of new art in society has always been an accurate barometer of a culture’s ability to adapt to new frontiers ... the lack thereof, heralds deterioration ...

It is incumbent on the individual - as importantly as the protection of unalienable rights - to discriminate between our sources of influence and education - between those of value and those that can be detrimental - and to realize the urgency and absolute necessity to prescribe quality education as a basic tenant of freedom ...

Despite what the entertainment and advertising industries have taught us; work, reason, and faith are the only antidotes for the opiates of modernity and the destructive reverberations of misinformation ...

If we simply applied the same tenacity to all experience as we did to becoming computer literate, or learning how to read, write, drive, or speak - our abilities and appreciation of the world around us would probably increase proportionately ...

The excitement of comprehension, one of the four principles of learning [according to Euclid], is a bridge that immediate gratification has replaced ...

James Carroll, founder of the New Arts Program and one of my former professors, tried to instill in his students “that they are responsible for the libraries of history they were born into” ... it’s the primary attribute of citizenry and humanist philosophy traceable to the foundations of western civilization in Greece and beyond ...

In an effort to succeed, i took this challenge seriously and have made a life-long pursuit of learning ...

the benefits have always out-weighed the effort as the world takes on new meaning and levels of beauty with the completion of every book, curiosity fulfilled, and discovery ...

One of the biggest obstacles we face as a relatively young culture is discernment - making informed decisions as we move ahead - being able to distinguish between credible and unreliable information ...

but that quandary shouldn’t cause suspicion of difference; only wariness of evidence and here-say ...

For the vitality of discovery to sustain itself, shifting the paradigm from the stupors of entitlement to curiosity and ambition is requisite - qualities that have been undermined by luxury and expectation ...

Previous standards of literacy are no longer applicable to the growing demand for skill, intellect, and reason in the 21st century - we either meet the demand for developing human potential to accommodate today’s quotas or submit to the impertinence of inaction ...

Some luxuries of entitlement will need to be sacrificed to survive competitively and education will become the key to modifying this current malaise ...

In the words of my late father, “If you can think it, you can make it” - and if we have to think till our brains hurt, it sure beats working till our bodies collapse as our ancestors did ...

no. 45 ...

red bud, pussy willow, forsythia, holly ...

it was ten years ago that i planted twenty three, one foot tall bushes and seedlings along the berm in front of the studio ...

today they create an impenetrable thicket as high as twenty feet - vibrant, lush, and teeming with wildlife ...

amazing what time and the right conditions will produce ...

persnickety ...

cool word but a terrible affliction ...

like being surrounded by a cloud of gnats - they distract from a nice walk, thought, or other pleasantry ...

for the sake of continuity, i’ll just run a few examples from a recent shopping trip ...

like getting paper change back from larger denominations; wrinkled, torn, and crumbled ...

is it so devalued that it doesn’t deserve a little respect or just too easy to come by that it doesn’t matter ...

i’ve been known to run an iron over badly manipulated bills so they set well in my wallet before going out ...

or in the fish department where the attendant claims she hates fish because of the way it smells and proceeds to throw fillets into a bag, un-flattened ...

and at $10 a pound, i would think that since its worth more than her hourly wage she’d treat the fish with the consideration she expects from her employer - not ...

or at an uncrowded check-out where the part-timer runs everything along the scanner into a crumpled, crushed heap as though the end of the world were imminent - and when i ask if they’re in a hurry and they say “no” - i wonder why they can’t go to the bakery or produce section to retrieve an uncrushed loaf of bread, pastry, or carefully chosen portabella mushroom they mutilated in their haste ... but its not their job and they’ll gladly deduct the damage from my bill ... the irredeemable, cavalier smirks come as a bonus ...

then there’s the parking lot riddled with abandoned shopping trollies - on a good weather day - some only a short distance from the trolley return - leaning against someone else’s well-cared-for car ... granted, some people are with toddlers that require securing as though they’re preparing for apollo missions or behavioral modification - but usually its just plain reckless abandonment ...

through it all, i don’t get upset - i just swish the gnats away with a nonchalant expression of disgust, but when asked - i’m honest - and the unwanted advice usually comes in the form of ‘chill out’ ...

or care less ...

but i guess that’s the point ...

echoes of silence ...

echoes of silence, 36"H x 40"W, 2008-2010 ...

sometimes a painting names itself - deep color, reverberating, dark echoes, silence, stillness ...

something about this piece conjures memories of walking through back streets in medieval cities at night - parts of Seville or Barcelona - late at night - in the hours after music and before birds, with few people and even fewer vehicles - the serpentine of alleys fall silent as shadows come to life - faint footsteps, stiletto heals and flamenco boots, whispers, groans, a distant laugh or scream, scavengers, glowing embers of something smoking, ghostly aromas ...

that time of elixir when the past blends with modernity in silhouettes from yellow light of street lamps against hand-hewn stone, stains, and misted reflections - fading beyond retreat ...

when imaginings from a weary, half-dreaming brain become more real than the risks of wandering unknowns, alone ...

where mysteries of chiaroscuro were born from the thickness of history and faith is ever-present ...

oddly enough, a search on the title revealed another source of shared vision - an article by Steve Binderman:

“Echoes of Silence: A Phenomenological Study of the Creative Process” ...

how to look ...

A recent comment reminded me: what I now take for granted didn’t always come easy - that is, to look at a piece of art and share the experience of the artists’ insights and efforts - to learn something from both ...

From an early age, Art has always been transporting - allowing me to live vicariously through the representations of the picture, satisfy my precocious curiosity, and raise questions leading to other inquiry; including the thrill of discovery - it was a way of un-puzzling mysteries ...

a way of utilizing that uniquely human characteristic of curiosity, deduction, and rational thinking ...

One of my first experiences with ‘great art’ was at the Philadelphia Art Museum. In and of itself, the experience left me awestruck; the classical architecture, magnitude, and the collections it housed. At ten years old I wanted to live there, and in subsequent years I probably earned partial residency status.

I came upon a piece that seemed gigantic at the time and totally captivated my attention: “Prometheus Bound” by Peter Paul Rubens. Nearly eight foot square - as big as some rooms of the house where I was raised. How did the artist paint it to look so real at that size? How did something so grotesque look so appealing, so sensuous and exciting? It made me think of similar feelings about paintings and sculpture of the crucifixion of Jesus and the Passions of Christ in our diocese. Who was Prometheus and why did he look so inhumanly masculine and why was the eagle attacking him? Why was it in partial darkness, where was it, and where was he bound? During the same visit I recognized other work that was either painted as darkly or had that lush and lavish appearance - but Prometheus stood out, and even at that age I knew I could only learn one thing at a time.

I’ve never been one to sit comfortably with questions so I began to ask teachers, and when that failed, went to the library - another favorite place to be. It turned out that Prometheus was a character of Greek Mythology and that he stole fire from Zeus who had him chained to a rock as punishment where a vulture would consume his liver every day - it would grow back - and the same would happen ad infinitum ...

Prometheus was apparently the cause of human suffering for mortals - whereas I thought it was Adam and Eve from stories in catechism - what made the Greek story different than the Catholic’s or Jews - those questions would have to wait. If the story was Greek in origin, why did the painting look as lush as Pennsylvania’s landscape. Everything I had seen of Greece looked more like the Jersey shore. Later I learned that Rubens was from the Netherlands and frequently traveled to Germany, Italy, and Spain - lived during a Baroque Period, and that artists often painted the surroundings they knew best. What I was finding from one painting is that every answered question leads to dozens more - an endless riddle of fascination with geography, history, literature, and people. My appreciation of cause and effect - and being human was elevated. I could write volumes on the impact of this painting and the trails of human history it left for discovery, but my point has been made.

Because of the complex trail of evidence left by a painting,I’ve learned to simplify my questions over the years when confronted by something new:

1. What word or series of words best describes my initial response? [What do I feel?]
2. When and where was the painting made? [Where is it from?]
3. What was going on when it was made? [What inspired it?]
4. Why did they choose the materials and approach? [What is it made of?]
5. What are the artists’ influences; personal and/or sociological? [What does he know?]
6. How does the piece relate to history - past and recent? [Why?]
7. What school of thought governs the painting?
8. How does it relate to my view of the world and which needs modification?
9. What does the paintings existence contribute to the world?
10. Does the artist deserve further consideration and inquiry of is their effort peripheral to my predisposition?
11. What have I learned by the experience?

As an example, lets look at the previous blog entry “no. 38” while applying these questions ...

The answers may look a little like this while beginning to form a thesis about the work:

1. what words ?... delicate/ frailty/ obscured/ mysterious/ predominantly white/ purity/ misty spots of color/ faint/ a little contradictory - busy and simple, scribbled but exact, spacious but dense/, uncertain but definite/ free/ liberating/ lyrical/ ...
2. where ?... rural Pennsylvania/ spring time/ northern hemisphere/ east coast of U.S./ near New York City, Philadelphia, Washington D.C./ NYC is the art capital of the world after WWII/ D.C. is the capital of the U.S./ Philadelphia has provincial history during Revolutionary period/ Native Americans occupied the area/ location of Civil War conflicts/ notable geography - Pocono mountains/ reputable industries/ academic surroundings - six universities in the area ...
3. what’s going on ?... blossoming of deciduous forests/ abundant farming region/ after a severe winter/ unseasonably warm spring/ political dramas surrounding U.S. Health Care reform/ public displays of discontent with government/ depressed economy/ the U.S. is at war with Iraq, Afghanistan, and troubled by stability in the Middle East with Iran and Israel/ there seems to be an unreasonable amount of fear about economy, jobs, health, and terrorism/ erratic and sometimes bigoted behavior among parts of the population/ beyond popular music, television, and movies there doesn’t seem to be much emphasis on culture or education/ the news media portrays its citizenry either as dumb and lazy or vicious and out of control/ ...
4. made of ?... translucent paper/ small scale/ ink/ sprays/ economical/ easy to produce quantity/ either for study, comparison, or commercial purposes/ interested in layering and obscuring previous ideas/ veils/ interested in drawing materials that are easy to apply/ capable of calligraphy, delicacy, and expression ...
5. influences ?... [available through google] - nature/ music/ abstraction/ dedicated/ serious/ informed and versatile in contemporary idioms/ politically aware/ jazz/ improvisation/ expressionism/ recent illness/ studio relocation/ reading physics and classical philosophy/ listening to Arvo Part, Elaini Kairindrou, Marilyn Crispell, Keith Jarrett/ frequents the Deerhead Inn jazz club/ spends a lot of time outdoors witnessing nature/ Lithuanian and Austrian ancestry ...
6. relationship ?... abstract, yes/ expressionistic - yes/ improvisational - yes/ similarities to other abstract expressionists and neo expressionists: Pollock, later work of De Kooning, Twombly, Polke/ differences: more deliberate, edited, combined/ intentional effort to combine selective areas and events ...

etcetera, etcetera, ... but you get the point - one thing leads to another and another - until every painting done by an artist [and i use the term cautiously], becomes a summation of previous works in a continuum ...

[P.S. So to comment on a prior comment - “I’m sure they would if they could” ...

It’s hard for me to imagine not having anything to say about art - and judging from what I see on other blogs and depreciating art copy, I believe most people are either ill-equipped to comment, don’t want to risk exposing themselves, or it’s too much of an effort to summon the will or reason - OR - maybe the art work isn’t deserving ...]

no. 38 ...

logos ... 4-6 ...

"Logos", 60"H x 96"W.

" ... surrounded as we are by all of this, we need to practice acceptance. Without disdain. But remembering that our own worth is measured by what we devote our energy to."

Marcus Aurelius, "Meditations", book 7, #3.

installation ...

I'm working on a 7' x 15' painting entitled "Aquarium" for a corporate environment ...

until the piece is complete, i arranged a few 'teasers' to spark curiosity and interest ...

"Lightness of Being" is being debuted center stage - flanked by the Homeric Paintings and "Placid Blues" studies ...

infidelities of reference ...

an essay on its way ...

easter sunday ...

one of the most important holidays in the Hallmark calender ...

named after the German spring goddess, Eastre ...

the day commemorates the official arrival of spring with the resurrection of the easter bunny from its burrow as foretold by the ground hog only weeks earlier ...

the easter bunny’s emergence is no doubt a forced evacuation resulting from invasive under-growths of daffodil and tulip roots ...

after his transmutation, the easter bunny proceeds to lay hard-boiled, colorfully decorated eggs while dispersing his stash of chocolates before they melt in the warm spring air or reach their expiration date ...

holiday hams and red beets are more symbolic staples of the carnivorous savagery of some sects while marshmallow peeps and jelly beans represent political extremes ...

the holiday rarely goes unnoticed anymore as shopkeepers count on revenues from the devout ...

lightness of being ...

The title describes the painting accurately ...

It began as a small group of works late last fall ...

The “Jupiter” pieces were inspired by an interest in the effect of planetary alignments and a motivation to continue to paint outside during the onset of winter’s frigid temperatures; allowing me a final foray with sweeping, lyrical gestures and unrestrained application of paint. The colors were deep, rich, and vibrant to contrast the start of December’s gloominess. The palette gradually shifted to dark, moody, and brooding tones, eventually taken to the depths of deep-space blues and black - not depressive or even melancholy; merely the solemn quiet of reflection and pre-dream transcendence induced by hibernation season ...

It was a transitional period of more than usual rest, reading, and meditation while nursing an on-going ailment and navigating an uncertain future ... my energy required delicacy and my sensibilities encouraged flexible acceptance ...

i became more cognizant of frailty and the tenuousness of things - all things ...

I thought about the novel by Milan Kundera; “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” - the struggle to find pattern and meaning in a seemingly random and circumstantial world governed by more vice than virtue - the foreboding momentum of nature’s forces - a book by physicist Frank Wilczek who explores unified theories and visions of nature in “The Lightness of Being” - and Andrew Light’s essays on environmental ethics ...

I’ve always been interested in applying thin layers of images until they achieved the appearance of something more substantial - an amalgamation of essential ingredients creating mass - from cerebral to tactile - and, as a result of the process - a historical account of events combined - an archeological assemblage ...

but the pieces are rarely read that way - they’re usually seen as a cacophonous, expressionistic collage; in the same way marble isn’t understood by its origins - only appreciated by the patterns it contains ...

lately, I’m more interested in the constituents of diaphanous and visceral matter with the goal of combining both techniques ...

“Lightness of Being” is a good example of how the alchemy continues ...

delaware ...

I’ve loved living and working near the Delaware River over the past ten years - a dream since art student days ... Located midway between Philadelphia and the Pocono Mountains; close to the conveniences of urban areas and sufficiently rural to witness the rhythms of nature in a relatively well preserved environment ... [meaning; there's nothing man has built that nature can't re-claim quickly] ...

Up to this point in my career, I’ve been blessed with wonderful studio spaces; partly because of my familiarity with the area where I was raised and educated, access to opportunities and resources, and a reputation of dedication to art as a way of life ... [the other part has to do with the fact that I’m a good gamble in the business of mutual exploitation - my knowledge, experience, and work provides a relationship with dividends]

If there is one thing I’ve learned from living in Nature over the years; it is, that everything has a cycle while everything is in the process of achieving its essential substance ...

I sense my tenure here is complete - that I’ve learned what I needed to learn to carry me for the duration; in the same way a student matriculates through universities to solidify knowledge prior to making their contributions to other audiences. Ones’ alma mater remains their intellectual foundation and nourishment. Nature and solitude have been wonderful tutors.

It is possible the process could have been accelerated by different environments, but I doubt that I would have had the opportunity to witness the experiences as fully as my sensibilities require - my tendency is orbital observation and participation; savoring the depths and variety of experience - perhaps for too long, but probably just long enough ...

The Delaware River that flows near the studio is the largest natural body of water - a few hours north of the Delaware and Chesapeake Bays and west of the Atlantic Ocean; and like other rivers in the region, the result of glaciers cutting their way through an ancient geography - as it continues to erode through obstacles in its on-going evolution ...

I’ve found solace, dreams, and inspiration on its banks over the years, and more recently metaphor with my own flow, desires, and possible destiny ...

I’m growing weary of the density, entanglements, and obstacles of the region during this phase of my life - a region thick with traditions and dogma, seasons and schedules, and a resistance to change that only accompanies brief history and success. It is the nature of the area and all the intrinsic elements that sustain it - not a criticism of the invaluable lessons they teach ...

What I can object to is the attitude and lifestyles of some, who like myself, migrated to the suburbs; those who violate the covenant of ‘quiet enjoyment’ one expects from living amid nature. A species who escapes to the country for a free-for-all existence without regard for the dreams of others or the reverence nature deserves. Those are the things only attrition can change ...

Perhaps it’s because I recently turned fifty-eight, or that I’ve had a severe bout with Lymes Disease, or realizing that sustaining a studio of this magnitude may only provide diminishing returns, or recognizing the political and economic climate’s urgent need for re-adjustment ... Either way, my future is shorter than my past and there’s less time to avoid the callings of my soul, work, and inquiry; or to accept the unacceptable ...

At this point, I realize I’m a big, characteristic Pisces requiring less of the same and more difference in a pond with too many limitations ...

I long for unobstructed, fluid vistas where possibilities flow without restriction - these are the dreams and prayers cutting my path to the future - as the river flows to the sea ...