To the statement that a full sun day bleaches out color I offer some images of the same wood now a week later. Maybe they won't show that much of a difference, see if you can tell. Of course there are a few more leaves.

These photos show how the color on a cloudy day differs from the bright morning sun and how it changes the landscape, this would be for the eye of the painter perhaps useful, perhaps not, by taste, some may like to paint the effects of bright light, as it can be more exciting for an image in paint. I thought it might be interesting to see what I suppose is a difference in mood. Everyone has an approach or an idea for what attracts them. Sometimes preconceptions play a part in what people do and how they live their lives. I think it perhaps healthier to teach art with an open mind, eye, and heart.

Things aren't always what they seem, even to the eye. The hand and eye usually propose something of a dream, a re-presentation of the intent. Increments are not captured in a camera, or painting, but the imagination knows what to provide. Only with time lapse photography do we see the unveiling of life. Ours is a Fleeting Floating World.






Even though there is beauty in the winter wood, in all it's earth tones and simplicity, during and after the snow, this spring it came to me why the early spring is so beautiful.

























Walking in the soft rain, the patter of drops from leaves and needles, more than from the sky, varies in volume and in pitch so that standing still and barely moving my eyes I hear depth and space. Looking then at the points of bud appearing on cherries, honeysuckle, dogwood, viburnum, increase by the hour, those points of green redefine the surrounding forest space, which for the most part had become flat, as the days of winter generally concern us elsewhere. Now the blend of bark and dry things take on a new visual, a new depth, a depth of field as everywhere these buds are slowly moving into leaves, and for my eye, they create depth where before we had forgotten, or only dreamed of the coming spring. These buds are in my senses, as if inflated by the wind, a secret celebration, musicians and painters alike, rejoice in life returning. So masterful is nature, many must try to capture this moment in tones and in paint. Some succeed. Perhaps the actual value is in becoming a part of this moment, shared with the autumn leaves, when in a measured amount of time, will no longer be. The attempt to express our feeling for the beauty in some way is life itself.




















With the factor of time, even on a Sunday, and the scattered showers, I turn to a camera rather than an easel, attempt to capture what caught my eye on a walk. A canvas I imagine would be more expressive of the sidelong glance, the haze of green appearing around the dark wet tree trunks could be created in paint, and received perhaps better than the photo that seems to fall short in it's exactness. Noticing this encourages me to get out the french easel in time, and render the imaginative sense of color. Even though it would lack the complexity of the forest floor, it would appeal more to the eye and the imagination of the viewer the way that paintings do, at least for me as in the early work of Mondrian, the sublime paint more therapeutic than the harsh reality of the photo. Still, meandering the wood and using my eye as a painter, I am making offerings to the alter of beauty, and I am refreshed.

I have to believe that in our young people is where the hope remains. They will pose the questions and give the answers, as ever, they will have the imagination to make the right choices, show the wise perspectives.

Having something to say, seems a bit like knowing someone, that is, when do we know somebody and when are we saying something? I ask because of: a conversation with someone, albeit an editorial person, about the internet and social networking blogs and the like; and, the drama "Six Feet Under" depicting a man who finds his deceased father had a secret life. And being the one who left home and the family business, found that his father actually was proud of him for leaving. My acquaintance in discussion had no interest in blogs, peoples personal lives, saying, well, can they write, do they have anything to say. What do these have to do with each other? The drama of a son who finds he doesn't know his father, and now never will, invokes a statement about society and in the mind of the audience the question of a son knowing a parent is not as important as the reflection, the thought that is stimulated or the imagination that it creates even if it is through sympathy with the character. What is important is what the viewer finds on an individual level from the experience of watching the drama. Isn't it about the implied image or experience and not the description spelled out. The room that we find our parent had in secret, we don't know what they did there or why, but it is suggested by an outsider that perhaps they needed something that was completely there own. And as Forester says (Finding Forester) about his own writing that happened to become popular and widely read and analyzed, that he wrote the book for himself. Not for the crowd, not for the critics, the intellectuals, but for himself.

Now I am a little sensitive about my writing and what might be thought of my blog, which I claim I do mostly for business reasons, but the statement about the writing on blogs made me wonder about it even more, and the notion of saying something. And the internet, and publishing, for that matter. Today I was sweeping up somewhere in the house and thought of all those stupid emails that come every day, over and over, and how the internet is rather like some middle ages carriage road, you never know who you will find there, who will be conning you, robbing you, and like someone said about a letterpress list I once joined, it's kind of like a cocktail party. I have also been told that to make it in the art world you have to go to lots and lots of cocktail parties if you want to get anywhere with your art business. So we can be creative but we have also to shmooze, and it often seems that we have to be in contradiction and be concerned about the "other" and be salesmen if we want to get "out there," get exposure, get a show or get published. Rather confusing, still, after all these years.

But with writing and having something to say, if I really think about it, I wish I had all those Alumni Bulletins my father won awards for, because I'd love to be able to read his writing and see what I might find if anything about what I know or don't know about my father and his writing. Also I think about how writing and having something to say has many perspectives, different angles to be considered from, right? There are readers, the editors, the styles, the voices, the plots, the scenes, the drama, fiction, nonfiction, etcetera, and how any of these can seem meaningless to a writer if we are to think of something purely as language. And when the object suggests conformity to the subject or vice versa, and not to get too philosophical, what about the reader and what he or she brings to the experience. To suggest in a sentence that one isn't saying something writing about their personal life, well, that just seems simple, narrow, and forgetting about the many books written about personal lives and the memoir, and oh my lord, do we have to come down to the good and bad of it? When it seems, in fact, that it isn't what we are saying but how we say it and what the reader does with it, if we describe the life out of it there is nothing left for the imagination. Yes I am concerned about culture and imagination and literature maintaining a certain level of quality, or as a poet friend once said, relevance, and if relevance is important, as a way of saying that the collective authority on the classical is always interested in maintaining their authority, we the readers are not so much interested in making judgments, as to having found something stimulating. Stein says in "Composition as Explanation" that everyone is naturally indolent and therefore innovation, a new brilliance in composition goes unnoticed, not accepted, until it does after who knows how long and when it does it becomes described as classical. And what of imagination? what will happen or who will know it is happening after generations of being handed our imagination on a plate or a screen or a pod or a video game, being told what we should want by commercials, after so long will there be any imagination left and what is the difference, if any, between reading a book and watching a movie? In "Finding Forester" he says when one is writing one doesn't think, one writes.

So, in the case of being creative, writing, painting, making anything, something is missed if one is concerned with the act and the outcome, as when Julia Cameron says not to be concerned with writing literature when doing morning pages, and morning pages are not to be confused with being creative as they are something one does to unblock creativity, nonetheless. As a visual artist that spent many years with many canvases trying to make paintings and being concerned with making "good" paintings, only to have a teacher tell me I was making "pictures," the best canvases were made only after all the thinking, all the conversations in my head stopped and I was looking and seeing the composition and the paint in the right amounts of each and through practice able to make visual choices that somehow came about by a connection between my hand and eye. Or maybe with my heart, free from all the clutter of the mind. Perhaps Forester is saying that writing is an act of the heart in imagination, having some decent vocabulary, finding what it is that we have to say.

Perspectives. Everything has a point of view. I know, personifications, objects becoming subjects are a stretch, but searching for a crossover, do we ever get the perspective of the almighty eye in the sky? The eye of god appearing in archetypal imagery of early printed books is open (no pun intended) to interpretation, as what may be a sense of the early understanding of the workings of the anatomical eye in correlation to the reflection of soul. Alchemists-- searching, working for the philosophers stone (see: Anatomy of the Psyche by Edward F. Edinger) as symbolism and art of literature and dreams in the middle ages and renaissance give uncanny glimpses of this threshold.

Taking some time to wander with my camera to exercise some sense of creativity by the eyes finding beauty in surrounding still lives, as it were, what remains and what returns. The effects of time and the occurrence of an extent of early spring has in no time, to the snow drops, do they need to know it is March or April, or May?

Thinking of this, and remembering the Futurist paintings (motion) as an expression of time, and some earlier works of mine, reading images with forms or patterns, the eye moves over them one point to another, an expression of time in some small sense, how it exists compared to the time of clocks. Interesting devices could seem an odd reflection in their miniature mechanical movements of transmission, how opposite from the measure of the sun, or the vast expanse of time relation we can hardly imagine within the universe, a concept open to interpretation. Look at this sense of life-time as representation and we enter the world of image and memory. Each existing together and independently often one before the other. Well, it's getting to be time for bed, but not by routine. So not to sound lame philosophically, Schopenhauer has much more to say on the subject of the world as re-presentation, as one translator pointed out so nicely.

Some one found me on the web and wanted me to go down to Woonsocket, RI, to help, to see if I could, restore an old R. Hoe & Co. press like mine.

The original state of the press was in pieces, abandoned in the back room amidst piles of old computer parts, furniture, newspapers in full bindings from the day, pieces of tables and odd machine spare parts.

A newspaper reporter told me it may have been painted gold in 1976 bicentennial celebrations. It required a lot of cleaning, and moving, and setting up with the fabricated replacement parts for the tympan and frisket. It came out looking really nice and is almost ready to print on. So close to being able to print on isn't good enough. So many things to do to accommodate the restoration of this press. In good shape the Hoe is capable of doing fine printing and facilitate teaching of book design in relation to relief printing; as it was a century or more ago, for books and other print media, and transitions of applications in history , as hoped, through hands on workshops facilitate enrichment of student experience. Letterpress, or relief printing, gradually moved out of main production methods with offset litho and digital technologies coming in, not long ago, and is kept alive by folks all over the country to this day. The letterpress fine press movement, as encouraged by Giovanni Mardersteig's Officina Bodoni, seems harder to maintain, but remains hearty due to many people printing, and helping printers with equipment, moving, fabricating pieces, and supplies, and the general appreciation for the book.

This #6432 R. Hoe & Co. washington style iron handpress now sits in the old train station on High and Main Streets, the edge of Downtown Woonsocket's historic section. The station, home to the national parks offices for Blackstone Valley, (The Depot), is one of many interesting and beautiful pieces of architecture on Main Street.

Be Creative

I want to write something about something, but I don't know where to begin, it's late, and everyone is in bed, and it could be there is too much to say. I've been inspired of late, cleaning up the old press and making adjustments, changing the form in the bed for a project for a keepsake, just one poem with some art.

Working on the handpress is from another time. Another time in my life and another time in history, the eighteen hundreds, when everything was massive, industrialization was sweeping, civil war, manifest destiny, reconstruction, carpetbagging. Everyone was writing in those days, well, for those that could it was the way the word was spread, communication was by letter until the telegraph. I don't know if it means much, but people expressed themselves through writing in the everyday, and maybe it isn't so different now, imagination, but it seems like maybe it is. There is something about putting a pen in ink and then to paper, like typewriter's have a certain atmosphere, with the sound of the keys hitting paper, that means, somehow, the writer is speaking and someone is listening, a conscious effort is being made to put into words things of the imagination, hopes, feelings, dreams, and even if nobody reads them, there is energy that goes out and we are becoming.

Julia Cameron speaks of this in her book, "The Artist's Way," Tarcher / Putnam, 1992, when she talks about doing morning pages, a kind of meditation through writing, she also calls it "brain drain" as when you do morning pages you're not supposed to think about that you are writing a novel, but to put your stuff on paper, anger, feelings. Anyhow, she says that it's best to write with a pen on paper and at least three pages, just to make the movement real, to "unblock your creativity", as that is what it's all about, this book, finding and learning ways to be creative, finding your Muse.

'Nough said.


"Art is an act of the soul, not the intellect. When we are dealing with peoples' dreams --their visions, really-- we are in the realm of the sacred. We are involved with forces and energies larger than our own. We are engaged in a sacred transaction of which we know only a little: the shadow, not the shape."
--Julia Cameron

mostly visual

This painting is about 35 years old. Perhaps a first self portrait. Probably painted over another painting, as I sometimes did, painted on anything. My first paintings on the cape were on old kitchen floor linoleum tiles, gray things with black streaks in them. Better than card board. Maybe it was an experiment at making a dark painting, everything else was impressionistic or fauvist.


I'm not much a writer. I like letter forms and to design books, print, read other folks writing. Jotting down memories and playing with words, my limited vocabulary, or an occasional creative idea is what I can hardly stand to post, and I keep changing posts, so if anyone actually looks, it could change by the next time, though I don't expect anyone would return. I tried a blog several months ago and thought it was awful and so took it down. Blogs for the most part seem self indulgent, but I like to browse them to see what's there, and that's fun, there are some interesting ones out there or in here, the universal soul, depending. Not really much time to do either, so it's late at night playing with images or reflections and impressions that come to me while cooking or listening to music, and often both.


















I'm getting older, and so time goes by more quickly, according to the radio today, while driving back from Dodge's Agway in NH with the truck full of timothy cubes, on PBS after 3:30 was a bit about the brain test, how long do you think it is before a minute is up. If you're twenty or so, you are right on, 60 or older, you tend to add about 30 seconds. So that's why it takes me so long to make a really good post, almost sixty, and probably the sixties, and my key board doesn't help either. I wish I had a keyboard like the one on the old iBook. It had a responsive keypad of flat, almost flush keys. Not these imitation typewriter keys that sometimes don't register the letter when I hit them. But I guess at least I can safely say I'm not over writing, one of the alleged dangers of writing on the computer.

". . . doesn't the sky look green today,"

The title here is a line from one of my favorite Jefferson Airplane albums, "After Bathing at Baxters." When cooking dinner and listening to it tonight I realized that the first time I thought about green skies was one evening while standing on the hill next to Charlie Philbrick's house looking at the early sun set when Charlie came out and spoke to me about the color green in skies. I don't know exactly what age I was at the time, maybe 11. I must have been doing some painting around that time. That moment I spent listening to him always stuck in my mind. I was impressed by what I remember hearing when he told stories about flying P51's in England, and knew he was some kind of a writer, and taught writing or English at Brown University. I didn't know much about anything, but for what I was searching out around Blackfish Creek and in little golden books about nature. Those moments touched me as a boy, to have an adult come out and talk to me about color in the sky, how most people wouldn't think there was green in the sky at sunset he said, but there it was. Now I am reminded of all those DeChirico's with green skies.

It was like the time he brought me some Johnny Cakes. I felt he was being a friend in a special way, he being an adult, the way Gill Franklin made me feel, sitting with me drawing flintlocks and powder horns one day, and when Gill took me fishing in his little motor boat, like a brother, different from some adults, and we caught bluefish.

Charlie had boats, too. He and the boys would spend the first days of summer getting the skiff ready for the water with caulk and rope, painting the bottom, painting the hull. They didn't seem to like it, but I found it interesting. Maybe my interest in things opened a door for those men to connect. Maybe it was the painting, there was always some painting to do, trim, windows, screen doors, floors and decks, all that oil paint, not so bad, the scraping and clean up not so good. One summer he took to making a kayak from a kit, he and Ben. I found it interesting. I spent a lot of time hanging around with them, as they lived next door, in the big house on the spot we had opposite Pleasant Point on Blackfish Creek, South Wellfleet, Mass.

There was a kind of grand circle of friends my parents had. Always getting together for cocktails or dinner cook outs, beach fires, fishing, talking, well talking at parties, fishing was a different ambiance. Often there would be the kids hanging around playing in the sand, or sometimes just I, when the grownups all would cram into our small cottage for Portuguese stew, drinks, clams on the half shell and cocktail sauce, oysters, bass, usually somebody had caught or dug some sea food. The Portuguese stew was something my sister brought home from Oscar's mother, and it was a hit. Kidney beans, cabbage, hot sausage, potatoes, broth. Clam chowder was a dish my mom made from the quahogs we'd dig in the creek at low tide which she couldn't eat as she was allergic to bivalves, but often did anyway, she liked them so much. The little necks, many officially to be thrown back, were eaten on the half shell. Yes, I ate my share of sea food growing up under the green skies of Old Cape Cod in the summertime. Not much anymore.

Encouragement of the Painter

I've been a painter for forty five years, with some breaks. Even if I am not satisfied, or feel a painting is successful, there is something rewarding, something energizing about doing it. It's nice to have an idea or an inspiration that keeps images coming forth, but it's not as important to be considering a body of work or a gallery show, or even that a great painting must be made, and that is something of a relief. And it can ease things up for true engagement and enjoyment.

Discovering, playing, applying, making textures, my images can be of different styles. Color and paint alone is fascinating. I believe that color and texture carry emotion and that being open to what moves through me brings something to an image. I remember going to a counseling center and seeing a young persons work on the wall that made me look at it every time. There was a mastery to the drawing and the coloring that was inspiring and beautiful, not a typical childlike rendering, abstract, that showed the intent and abandon to expression that allows for magical things to happen with color, that's what I think I found beautiful in it.

I might have thought that somewhere along the way I had lost something of that energy , but seeing that piece took me beyond that, or I went away with the idea that maybe I could get it back, or find it again, uncover. Most of the time when I see good paintings I get inspired, and it feeds me somehow, and in that way I feel like a painter again.

Music Even in the Quiet

Sometimes I don't feel the cold and the wind when I look up at the stars or the moon. The moon lights up the snow, shadows fall of the trees and, the sense is almost like being on the edge of the universe, looking up, I almost have no body. But I do . . .

I chose this blog title for a song on "After Bathing at Baxters," one of my all time favorite albums back then, when it came out, and still is. An old friend gave it to me a few years ago, and like the boxed Jimi somebody else gave me, listening to it is like opening a doorway onto a room full of stuff. Music and smells do that, well, what doesn't do that, I guess. I have a program from an Airplane concert that I saw in Providence in probably 1967, that does the same thing. The "Ultimate Spinach" opened for them. I can still see the cops standing around the front of the stage, the classic light show. The program is a book with pictures and lyrics, what a treasure.


















Anyhow, it seemed encouraging, this title, and to name the blog in this way, even if nobody knows. I'm not sure I want to give it away, but I notice several folks out there on blogger come up with the Airplane in their profile. Cheers.

It's quiet and cold tonight, and if I try, in my head (feed your head) I can hear that band taking off.

Owling

This is something to do like morning pages any time of day. You know morning pages? Writing to unblock creativity. Let off steam, have something to look at and reflect on, to keep the magic going. I think it maintains positive thinking, which in turn makes me happy, connects me to my soul and the universal soul, and even though I am not writing on paper with a pen, something is heard, the energy of my conscious mind exists, helps create a reality. Good energy creates good reality.

I get tired of news now. Hype and sensation and only PBS news can give me something to think about, generally most of it seems almost irrelevant to me, negative energy that causes stress. I need less stress.

I like reading blogs of other folks out there that really have something to say about their life, thinking out loud. Some write really well. I know I don't usually, have to edit and correct voice and tense and type-os. My key board sucks, always leaving out letters and switching letters. I have to work at it, but it falls into the category of creativity. Even if it's only brain drain. So if I feel self conscious and vain, well, there are lots of others out there doing the same thing. We find our selves and similarities, feel humble, excited, and it yet looks good.

Oh, and by the way, if you don't know about morning pages, look up Julia Cameron's book "The Artists' Way" as it has lots of suggestions for why we get stuck, and it is available, or was, on cassette, probably now on CD. The tapes are a favorite of mine because you can listen to her voice and drive and consider things, all at the same time. I found them helpful. Julia is funny and interesting. Writing really works, too, dealing with any thing that seems to get in the way. It's not so new, a diary or a journal functions that way, like talking to myself, I get to express feelings, reach understandings about my self.

(And if you don't believe in a universal soul as in the universe has energy and consciousness, consider the universal soul is now on the internet in the form of all these blogs people are doing.)

Bay Rum

for Wendy

Could I buy a deck chair
one with plastic weave, aluminum frame,
nestle into sand of Duck Harbor,
smell the dune grass, sweet fern,
bay leaf. Like a loosed mooring,
or trap buoy that could,
when high water comes, go
drift flotsam on the smell of the bay,
the smell of the bay.
Face full sky above,
sea anemones below,
rub shoulders with angel hair,
dead man's fingers, rock weed.

Darkly Dreaming

Returning to a place can begin the reflection, roaming the memories that turn up the usual and the unexpected.

Don't know what it is that makes a moment of indecision hang around the brain, those words spoken without sensitivity, a blank heat swooped stare, linger. A misplaced expression of disinterest that won't leave you alone, returns, gathers reinforcements and leads to restless natives at the gates. Pretty soon everyone seems to be giving you a look like a seventh grade math teacher with a crew cut that takes you out in the hall and tells you why you should get a hair cut. And you always remember that before that time you were doing well in math.

Some will say it's not enough exercise, or too much drink, or smoke, or sex, or almost anything but that which would do you the most good. Like that chilly morning I wore gloves in gym, playing baseball on the asphalt school yard, when the teacher that had to have been a marine said, "what are you gonna do when winter comes?" Why can't people just ignore those things, stir up a bit of compassion to say I won't make an indelible painful memory out of this moment so small no one else will ever remember it. When someone does say something good that takes away the moment it is rare, and not usually our own voice from within, though it could be, as I find times when I have said such things to an other and made a friend.

Too often those moments are also rare. As when I said, "I understand," to a woman in college, we fell in love and spent a number of years together only to find that I didn't have the make up to say things like that often enough, and eventually she was telling me I wasn't aggressive enough. That statement was most confusing as she seemed like the kind of person that preferred collected balanced men, but in truth was attracted to passion and spirit. That was what she meant, but I didn't have a clue. Sometimes people don't say what they mean,I don't know, it was one of those times when one takes up reading, as I did, Loa Tsu every night, and tried to better myself, literally find or replace what was wrong with me and make it better. It went pretty well until one day while contemplating my condition with a candle in a cast resin candle holder, somebody distracted me. I don't know if it was Joe who, when I asked if we could talk said, "you never talked to me before," as if I had been secretly implying his inane behavior and gave him his chance to take a hit, as a few others were doing. In later consideration, much stronger moments, I thought, why didn't a friend say something, if I was such a stupid boy friend . . . and so times begin to add up, take confusion as a header, and end with the question why do people do things. But only long after an age of soul searching from the point of view that I was a jerk.

I came back shortly to a room filled with carbon and a smoldering candle holder. The smoke was thick, almost blotted out the light from the windows. The carbon crept into the open drawers of the dresser. Plastic resin carbon sticks to everything like memories of a break up. I was able, it seems for the most part, to forget the ordeal of cleaning, where to sleep, before or after, how we could have done it successfully, and all the details, are blank. These emotional moments remain, undetermined by significance, certain moments that leave questions in our minds or heart seem to live on after thirty years or more. They are clips or frames of a day with a person or two, a pot of soup, a painting, a house, most likely some words that have slipped away are why the clips are there, but perhaps, too painful to keep, the rest of the day hangs like a carbon covered coat in a closet.