The Only Rational Act

Lots of work these days, complete with deadlines and even (Oh Yeah!) compensation. More than ever, I’m cultivating the flow state — the zone — that state of consciousness which allows us to leave the bulky harness of the here-and-now, and move into unity with the work itself. In this space, for me at least, solutions flow into the process seemingly without any effort on my part. In fact, from this magical place, I am my most rational … my most productive … my most creative. Time vanishes. The dots connect themselves. The output is peak performance. And the input is … what?

The only word that seems to fit is love. When I pour creative attention into a project, I feel love for the inputs — the process — the outputs — and the outcomes. This is not that clingy, anxious sort of love … like a relationship gone wrong. It is the exact opposite. I’m sure you’ve been there … in sports or work or play … everything in the world makes perfect sense … it is so easy — like knowing without learning.

With so much work to do, seems best not to leave this “in-the-zone” business to chance. One researcher determined that there are three conditions required to enter and maintain the flow state:

• clear goals

• immediate feedback

• optimum skill-to-challenge ratio (He postulates that 4% is best — meaning that the challenge level is just slightly beyond our perceived competence, thus the pull of the just-out-of-reach goal keeps us in the zone.)

This is the perfect storm of portrait painting: a known objective, a process that always tells you where you are, and the drive of an ever-haunting fear … “all those other times were just a fluke … you’ll never be able to do that again … what were you thinking … is it too late to get a real job!”

One time in Asheville I was hanging around with some artist friends, and James, who was forever on the hunt, was trying to attach himself to a lovely woman clustered with her tribe at the other end of the bar. His usual pickup line, “I am an artist,” didn’t seem to be moving this clearly very bright woman. She came back with, “ok … but are you a serious artist?” His response was pretty good: “If you go out with me, I promise I will never paint your dog.” Most artists I know, the good ones at least, have an internal line in the sand. For me, until now, that contemporary-potrait-painter-line has been on the SERIOUS side of this: little girl on a porch swing with kittens and flowers … under no circumstances would I go there … to the Hallmark movie of portraits. So naturally, that’s exactly what I’m painting right now. And here’s the scary part — it was my idea, not the client’s.

The background flowers for “Hanna and Phoebe” are pink azaleas. From memory of course, I’ve been rendering highly stylized mounds of Italian yellow ochre-bohemian green earth-sap green-permanent green leaves, neutral gray n2-brown pink bark, and permanent rose-brilliant yellow extra pale flowers. Cerulean blue specks of sky peeking through. To me, the work feels like that sweet azalea sigh southerners know so well … wandering around every spring enjoying the fresh, home-grown reds, and lilacs, and yellows. and mandarins, and pinks, and whites. And there’s the little thrill of spotting a favorite variety … like Golden Retriever owners giddy from stumbling across other people’s Goldens.

As I’ve written so many times in this blog, I love the work … every bit of it …. even the hunger. Only now something is different — I’m feeling less conflicted about it. My inner Don Quixote’s sanity is defined by the love codified within the quest itself.

Given the outcomes and the alternatives, to love is the ONLY rational act.

The Place Where There is Nothing to Explain

It takes time to build a masterpiece. Or does it?

There is the time to conceive of, design, and paint it. There are the thousands and thousands of hours of learning to draw and paint … dreadfully at first … then slowly feeling the hand and the eye and the spirit working together … then light dawning on the truth of it all as mastery approaches … and finally …. finally knowing that you can paint anything … the monetary bliss of that, followed by the dark burden of “now what?”

When completely lost in painting, there is no time. In fact, there is no anything. There is a dreamlike sea of color and shape and story and emotion — when the soul expresses itself. I think this is called unity consciousness, at least that’s what I call it. If you’ve ever been in this zone, you know that if there is any time at all, it is experienced in a vastly different way … as plastic and observable. It is not concerned with the habituated reality of a clock-time-march …. it is ours to ride wherever we want … like children on bicycles.

Aside from the commissions I’m just starting, there are only two unfinished paintings in my life — Garden and the Dendera Study. The latter is part of the (yikes!) Unseen Architecture work. It is based on the Dendera Zodiac ceiling bas-relief from the chapel dedicated to Osiris in the Hathor temple at Dendera, an ancient timepiece.

All that’s left to do on Dendera Study is detail the hands of the large figure, and sign it. Have absolutely no idea why I have never bothered to finish it over these dozen or so years …. but today is the day. Like the celestial calendar from who-knows-how-long ago, maybe the little painting and I have cycled back to the proper place to make these last few marks. We have finally crossed an ocean to a place where there is nothing to explain. It sure took us a long time to get here … or did it?

Going Native

Over the years I’ve bought dilapidated houses in what are described generously as transitional neighborhoods … first in Charlote then St. Augustine, and now in my beloved little village, Lockhart. In all cases I have ultimately contributed to change in the neighborhoods, but more than that, the neighborhoods have changed me. No question about it … I always go native.

In St. Augustine I bought a large house, once grand, built by Flagler’s railroad guy. From what I learned, the original owner was a leader in the emerging Black middle class Flagler created with his investment in the town. When I bought the crack house on Oneida Street, it had no windows, holes in the floors, no wiring, but remarkably, one working bathroom. In any other community this house would have been raised. But not in St. Augustine … gotta love that! So I camped in the house while I restored it. My neighbors, most Black, considered me to be the craziest white woman on the planet. They worried about me …. no kitchen, no electricity (at first), no air conditioning. Every evening a child would show up with a foil covered paper plate …. my supper.

The Johnsons were my closest neighbors … Larry and Dotty, their four daughters, and five grandchildren. (I painted all of them.) And as certainly as my supper would arrive at 6:00, Larry (below) would show up in the morning and start working on the house with me. He rarely said anything, just started working. Finally I began paying him. Eventually, he became my best friend. He would explain the world to me in ways I would have never even imagined.

Now, in my little village of Lockhart, population 621, I’ve gone native again. I’m one of two college educated people living here … the other is a writer, Chic, a close friend since 7th grade. Interestingly, Chic has never integrated into the town … after ten years, he barely knows anyone here. Conversely, after two years I’m a “local”, proudly the town’s “very own artist”.

Yesterday evening I sat outside for a few minutes, safe distancing, with a couple of neighbors and listened to their stories … of childhood in the then-thriving mill town, of family, of cheating spouses, of crazy pranks, and, yes …. of politics. I heard, “I didn’t go to college like you, and I understand that … you are from a different world … but let me tell you how I feel and why …” I love these neighbors of mine, and they love me. By the end of the evening I had traded a painting for a tiny baby kitten. If you’ve never gone native, you should try it … you will never be the same.

Like many people, I worry about my country on this 4th of July. But with only a very few exceptions, I don’t worry about her native sons and daughters. Our differences are not real. We want the same things. We just don’t know how to listen to each other.

Awash in Butterflies

Have made some progress on Garden, and ready to spend the day of Eve’s butterfly dress … and then butterflies, maybe ghostly shadows, moving heavenward. Still working out the details on all that. Here we go. Happy Independence Day!

Sins of the Past

It seems like our global pain and reconciliation has come home to roost personally, in my life and in the lives of the those I love. Maybe that’s because our inner and the outer lives house essentially the same energy … at least that’s what I believe.

Relitigating old pain … some of it ancient pain … offers the benefit of exposure … of acknowledging and re-experiencing the pain. That’s the conventional approach. And I guess there’s a role for that since most people are comfortable with their conventional patterns of thought. But “all boundaries are conventions waiting to be transcended.” One of my most important teachers, Janet Sussman always says,

“There are two ways to take out the trash: we can look at it while we take it out, or we can not look at it. Either way, we have to take out the trash.”

Language has power and direction, like a vector. Content comes from one place and moves in the direction of the subsequent place, and along the way, ideas and feelings are conveyed. I know it’s semantics, but experiencing old problems and trying to work them out, doesn’t sound very efficient or fun to me. I think the words we choose, in large part, are the thoughts we choose. And the words we chose along the process of rebuilding with a new reality, just like the colors we choose for a painting, define the ultimate destination.

This painting is the first real piece of art I purchased. It’s by Jim Byrne. When I saw it at an opening, I was spellbound. And for months after that, seemed like every time I closed my eyes, it drifted into view. So finally I tracked it down. It was delivered to me in Charlotte, crated like a piece of furniture. As it hung over the fireplace, I gazed at it for hours … just drank it in … and walked myself through the step-by-step process of creating such an emotionally charged object. I would picture the canvas underlayer, and how the paint was built up … how did it feel to hold the brush … what did the very first brush stroke look like … where was it … and why did Jim start there. And how about second brush stroke….

After about three months of that, I became a painter. When my birthday rolled around, I ask for art supplies, which baffled everyone since I’d never painted before. The first thing I attempted was a portrait, and it turned out to be a pretty good one. No one was more surprised than I.

I don’t understand the process that started in me, sparked and fed by this painting, Hammock. But I know art has the power to do magic. And the process of visualizing the final picture long before you get there is where the magic happens. It changes our language/thought patterns to experience the beauty as it emerges … not lingering on the muddy, disorganized footsteps along the way. Taking out the trash without looking at it.

Billie's Meyer Lemons

This weekend we will celebrate four Father’s Days and two Birthdays. Up until a couple of years ago when she moved out of her house, my mother Billie had several amazing Meyer lemon trees. She’d keep them outside all summer, and the bring them indoors for the winters. If you’ve never had a Meyer lemon, please try them … plump and juicy and almost sweet … one of my favorites. This little birthday painting was done from a photograph of Mom’s last lemon harvest. I remember taking the picture in those strange days as she was packing up the house … and downsizing. I can’t remember who got the lemon trees … family and friends. The glass bowl belonged to Mother’s grandmother, and then her mother, and then to her … always filled with fruit. I’ve always loved the way the glass spheres around the rim of the bowl reflected the fruit …. like little fruit-filled-marbles. This little picture, 10 inches square, is headed for Mom’s apartment kitchen in Charlotte. The painterly style is highly energetic … and seems to work well for the subject, even on such a small canvas. Sure hope all that thick paint will be dry enough by Saturday!

So with this done … and a couple of other small pieces to wrap up today … I can move on to the four commissions …. Little girl with Cat, Man with Dog, Sign with Cow, and Dog. Whey!

Dragon vs Wetiko 2

Finally decided to put the finishing touches on this little piece. At the very end of a painting … and in the final moments, we bring out the …. wait for it …. wax. Williamsburg makes the best of course. My classical technique uses thin, semi-transparent layers of color, so blasting those final highlights with opaque lead white mixed with just a trace of nickel yellow (a cool yellow) brings the picture to life … and when the back of my neck tingles, the thing is done.

Wetiko is turning out to be more than I imagined. But change is sometimes ugly on the surface. Underneath, well … best to hold a vision of future the we want. Like staying true to the vision of a finished painting … even when things look muddy … it is the dream of the ultimate reality that pulls me along to the picture I want to see …. and the world we want to share. Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.

So tonight I’ll enjoy my private painting-done ritual. Nice dinner, candles, flowers, and an interesting book. Life is good.

Color and Beauty and Craft

Over the past couple of days, as the country burns … with understandable anger among the oppressed, and rapturous anger among the divisive …. there’s been no painting. It’s not that I’ve been feasting on the crisis … I’ve actually tried to avoid the news …. tending to the lawn, digging in the dirt, cultivating black-eyed Susans, loofahs, and vegetables to climb all over the fence, further separating StudioKitchen from the world with a living border wall …. oddly, fantasizing about how to make the four-foot enclosure even higher. I love my little village, I really do …. there’s no reason to shut it out. I just don’t want to live in this version of my country right now. I want to make my own country: population 1 artist, 1 golden retriever, and 3 cats.

Like everybody probably, I feel the pressure of darkness around me, and I know that if I don’t get back to the studio it will take me down. Color and beauty and craft will restore me the way they always do. So I’m back to work on this little painting. Purple tulips, white poppies, and a Chinese dragon should be just the ticket. If history can be counted on, I’ll go to bed this evening thinking it’s finished … then wake up at 2:00 am to “hit it again”. If the world weren’t burning, this would be a perfect day.

A Country Once Forested

Eleven years ago I had just begun to explore, through study and art, a theme that has preoccupied me since childhood — the convergence of science and spirituality. Here’s where I think it started:

When I was eight years old, and suffering a family trauma, I withdrew deep into myself. Hiding in a secret compartment under the attic stairs, I would pray. My prayers were answered by someone I called “the Doctor”. When I told my sister about him, she said these dangerous stories were going to land me in a home for crazy children, where they would “lock me up and throw away the key!” … so it became my biggest lifelong secret. But during those troubled times, I visited the Doctor often, and was always calmed. He would explain what was going on with my family in terms of science and math. He never, ever mentioned the Bible … so in my eight-year-old brain he couldn’t possibly be God … and quite reasonably, I called him the Doctor, like Doctor Albert Einstein.

The Unseen Architecture phase was my attempt to access the underlying fabric of the universe … to articulate something I had always felt, but could never grasp in a material way. Since I was driving everybody nuts with these unfathomable paintings, I wrote a little booklet tying the art to ideas … calling on great writers and scientists and poets and artists to help me tell the story.

When I woke up this morning to the news of cities on fire, this current atmosphere of hate and division made me wonder where my country has gone …. how it has come to be so lost to me. I tried to imagine a way back from this ‘Country Once Forested’. One page of the Unseen Architecture booklet reminded me how timeless and universal this struggle is in humanity — the struggle to remember who we are, and not go back to sleep.

The image on the page below is a bit hard to read, so here’s the poem by Wendell Berry:

In a Country Once Forested

The young woodland remembers

The old, a dreamer dreaming

of an old holy book,

an old set of instructions,

and the soil under the grass

is dreaming of a young forest,

and under the pavement

the soil is dreaming of grass.

Better than it Has to Be

A couple of weeks ago I got a call from a friend in Charleston, a member of the Coburg Dairy family, who wants a funky, cool painting of …. wait for it …. the Coburg Dairy sign! The original is for her, and then we are going to make prints for family members. The sign is iconic in the area, and although it’s changed over the years, most Charlestonians …. at least those who have been on the scene for a while …. consider it a treasured landmark … sort of like the statues of pigs adorning Piggly Wiggly owner Buzzy Newton’s Battery home.

As I settle in this evening, reviewing the photos she sent, I’m getting more and more excited. This will be too much fun … eventually. But right now I’m swimming in a sea of compositional elements and perspectives and palettes and scale and abstraction and yak yak yak. This is the time of unmoulded potential, the unconditioned about to take form …. known as the Fool in the Tarot deck. Pure potential is uncomfortable in a way because it’s just a bunch of ideas buzzing around with no organizing construct. But in that moment when the unifying idea emerges …. it feels like magic …. better than it has to be.

Christmas Morning in StudioKitchen

So so so excited to have received my new shipment of art tools and materials. With all the upcoming work, my rag-tag assortment of brushes and paints simply had to be replenished, so I bit the bullet, as they say. I don’t even want to tell you how many hundreds of dollars have just been unpacked. People really have no idea how much good art tools cost …. just like any other endeavor, I guess. But as Ben Long used to say, '‘you’ve got enough to overcome as an artist without having to work with inferior tools.”

Nineteen brushes … all filberts (that’s really all I use now) …. these are the smaller sizes 0 to 10 because (given my technique) the big brushes last vastly longer than the smaller ones. Robert Simmons Sapphire for finish work, Windsor & Newton Monarch for that time between the underpainting and the delicate top glaze layers, and Princeton Dakota, a new brush for me, with long firm bristles and a sharp edge … want to test drive these for outlining, on the rare occasions I do that.

And Williamsburg paints. My uncontested favorite. I remember Ben always hated them because they can be unpredictable …. which is precisely why they are perfect! Riding the wild horse.

Here’s a no-accidents-in-art story about Williamsburg Paints. My friend Bucko Brandt advised me on several occasions to connect with a friend of his, a well respected Charlotte Art Czar named Larry Elder. I tried to connect, but Larry had just sold his gallery, and I wasn’t finding an easy path to him. Some time later I stumbled into him at a gallery in South End … in fact, someone I didn’t even know said, “I think you should meet Larry Elder, and took me upstairs to his office.” I told him about my connection to Buck, a little about my art pedigree, and showed him some work. He closed the office door and offered me some cookies. “Let’s talk a little bit.” (They were really good Christmas cookies … I think his wife made them and he didn’t want to eat too many so he brought them to the office to share.)

Somehow I mentioned Williamsburg paint … I have no idea why because it’s not something that would normally come up. So it turns out … here we go … the company had been founded by a New York artist named Carl Plansky. Great painter. After his death in 2009 the entire collection of his work went to one dealer — Larry Elder. When asked if I knew Carl, I said no but I love his work. Larry smiled … “come here.” Outside the office … up and down several halls were all of Plansky’s paintings. I was spellbound. Still am, actually …. it was Larry’s guidance that led me to my new gallery situation … not the traditional business model … rather a design center filled with all sorts of creatives … and art.

So for this Christmas morning in May, it’s only Williamsburg paints for me … in gratitude.

The Siege in the Room

With the new Charlotte gallery opening in August, I’m reeling with a sort of edgy electricity — four paintings underway, three new commissions to start, and a multi-layered research project — one which will require, because of the times, complete openness to new realities. I’m feeling what Samuel Beckett referred to, when embarking on a period of intense creativity in his life, as “the siege in the room.” Sitting with the blank canvas for “Hanna” and working out details of the composition since very early this morning, I’m trying my best to get lost in one project at a time, while keeping the others organized and airborne.

Honestly, I truly love these times of barely controlled creative fever … riding the wild horse … a time to, as my father always challenged me, see what I’m made of. Never has a life of rural isolation served me better and I’m so thankful for that: the reclamation of StudioKitchen, while not finished, has settled into a comfortable place; the garden is in; my loved ones are safe; there’s food in the pantry; recently re-stocked studio supplies; and probably enough money to keep the lights on …. hell, this summer I’ll even have the luxury of air conditioning …. so here we go!

I’m ready to lose time for a while (an antisocial work schedule untethered to the clock or calendar) … actually, that’s already happened. There was a time I worried about such weird work habits and rituals, but not anymore. All that matters in the end is the work. We were put here to create, and I have finally digested the red pill — success has absolutely nothing to do with validation, or security, or conformity, or anything else on the material plane — to create is simply why we are here. And as scary as it is for us to trust, doing what we are here to do is all the sustenance we need, and then some. Samadhi, as Buddha said … “when you realize how perfect everything is you will tilt your head back and laugh at the sky.”

A while back I found a book about the work habits of artists, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work. An easy read, it’s REALLY interesting, and it also makes me feel better about living an unconventional life among mostly conventional people. In fact, reading about other creatives’ daily lives and peculiar relationships makes me feel almost normal.

… About painting while listening to a book or television … I’m in good company. Chuck Close:

Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. [He likes to have the TV or radio on in the room.] I like a certain amount of distraction. It keeps me from being anxious. It keeps things a bit more arm’s length.

… About the angstie start of a new project, Joyce Carol Oats:

Getting the first draft done is like pushing a peanut with your nose across a very dirty floor.

… About the overwhelming compulsion to get back to the studio, Ernest Hemingway:

You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again. When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty and filling, as when you have made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through.

Love is Meant to be Shared

I’ve taken a few weeks off from the studio to work in the garden … and this morning as I’m having coffee with Orchid-and-Buddy, my aching back, sore knees, and sunburned shoulders remind me that it’s time to get back to work in the studio … well … guess I’m also compelled by two new commissions, work-in-progress for the gallery, and a fun research project …. an embarrassment of riches in these threshold times.

All beauty gives us joy, of course … and for me, the beauty of my garden growing is absolutely sublime … it is to swim in a living sea of color and architecture … one co-created with the nature. Like mother’s milk, it is everything we need. My highest aspiration is to capture even the tiniest bit of that energy with paint on linen, and to codify it in the color layers and the forms so that the viewer FEELS something. Love is meant to be shared.

Orchid-and-Buddy came to me this time last year … both were birthday gifts. For some reason, I’ve always kept them together … forever touching. In fact, from time to time over the past year I had the notion to separate them … but I couldn’t … it just felt …. WRONG. You should know, I love love love orchids. All flowers are beautiful, but orchids have magical architecture …. like spaceships. Painting them is trancelike. And … this is crazy … but I’ve never had one re-bloom. Never … and not for lack of trying.

Until now. I have absolutely no idea why this orchid is different from countless others … but maybe it’s a good idea to give an orchid a little buddy … maybe true love is meant to be shared.

Orchid-and-Buddy

Dreams of My Brother

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been having remarkable dreams during this pandemic time. I’m always an active dreamer, but these are particularly vivid and powerful. Probably my subconscious is busy busy trying to make sense of these times … and help design my new future. From night to night some of the same characters and constructs appear in the story … not advancing the same plot line … just the same elements appearing here and there … much like in my paintings. (Right now, in fact, the image of tulips I’m using for a dragon piece has showed up in two previous paintings.)

One recurring construct is that I’m living inside my computer, moving around the universe via programs and portals. And the cast of characters — the archetypes — are the Yellow Dragon, Michael the archangel, various talking animals of unrecognizable species I’ve come to call the mixed-mammals, and my big brother. The brother archetype is not the dreaded Orwellian “Big Brother” … mine is a buddy, a confidante, and a protector …. the brother I’d always wanted as a kid because he would play sports with me. And unlike other members of the circus, he’s just a normal person. Except that he looks a lot like my father. Fair hair, blue eyes, fine features, and thin lips.

In the mid 90’s I was conducting marketing research by day, and madly hacking away at portraits and figures by night. I had just begun to paint when my father died. From the time of his cancer diagnosis to his death was a year. I had been expecting this most of my life …. but that’s another story.

It took him two weeks to die. My mother, sister and I rarely left his bedside. Although we all lived in Charlotte at the time, he was in the Wake Forrest teaching hospital in Winston Salem. He did not die from the illness or surgery. In a small room crowded with medical students and Dad’s surgeon, one student asked “Why are his systems are shutting down; this is not the result of his illness?” The answer was “He has chosen to go.” His girls already knew that, of course. No one had to say it. My father always walked his own path.

As he lay dying, he moved in and out of the here and now. He’d come back from time to time to report on his wanderings across the universe … visiting all the places a dying rocket scientist dreams of. He wouldn’t let us take his glasses off, saying “I want to see everything.” Always a lover of the moon, and avid numerologist, he kept telling me, “don’t worry … it will be 7 or 8 … it will be 7 or 8.” None of us could decipher that, but we figured it had meaning. Turns out he left at exactly ten minutes before midnight on December 7th. Seven or eight. The night of the full moon. He was 62, the age I am now … or will be in a couple of days.

During those two weeks I was in the middle of a huge research project — the wide ranging public opinion study that would guide development of Charlotte’s ten year plan. A total of 22 focus groups, two per night, had been scheduled for months in advance. All sorts of community stakeholders. There was no way to reschedule, and there was no way to replace the moderator. So I drove to Charlotte every evening to conduct the groups, and then returned to WinstonSalem to sleep on a chair in Dad’s hospital room.

With the groups finally completed, I relaxed in his room while my sister and mother popped out to shower and eat. I watched him dreaming and longed to freeze that exact moment forever. I had not started drawing at the time, only painting, but my hand was twitching and moving … so I found a tiny note pad and one of my treasured Sailor fountain pens. (Always loved the feel of painting words and numbers on the paper with sepia, green, or lamp black ink. ) This is the only rendering I’ve ever done of my father from life. It was his last day.

Last night I dreamed of my brother again. We bumped into each other in a grocery store, then stood and faced each other for a while. We reached out both hands, touched all ten fingertips, wove our fingers together, and held hands.

There Are No Accidents In Art

Guess I am a bit focused on dragons these days. In fairness, the connection predates our pandemic. But not by much … in some mythical place maybe the dragon showed up with a mission …. born at the right time. The Yellow Dragon, in Chinese mythology, is an earth deity. Protection and good fortune. And that’s a good start.

Tracking the course of these recent lock-down paintings, when Charlotte empty street Angels morphed into Dragons, I finally began to connect the dots … to understand how these powerful archetypes are working on me. The angel symbolizes our linkage with God energy, of course. But not in that limp, woe-is-me sort of way, gripped by fear and crying ‘oh, help me, I’m so powerless’. No way …. not as I read the texts.

If you believe, you can do these things I do and even greater.

Enter the Dragon (and Chinese …. interesting accident). He expresses what is best in all of us — what is brave and smart and creative and compassionate. When he showed up in my studio, with the recent work on “Garden,” I felt he represented our separation from the earth. Now, even more than that, he stands steadfast in contrast to Wetiko — a mind virus that separates us from each other. Superficially, as social distancing. Symbolically as mask wearing. And systemically, as zero sum, material thinking …. disunity on a global scale.

He sees the Spiritual everywhere translucent in the material world, and he does not want to escape the responsibility of being a Dragon.

I don’t think the dragon phase is quite finished. Hell, with one painting on the easel upstairs, another on the easel downstairs, and a third on the drawing table in layout …. evidently not. It’s such a great force to work with in threshold times. For these last few weeks all I could do was paint these images …. not even really understanding the story they were telling. I couldn’t write about it, or even talk about it. I just dreamed and painted, and dreamed and painted … knowing in my heart that things are not what they seem.

Springtime vs the Coronavirus

There will be two of these … maybe more. This one is Huanglong (Yellow Dragon) vs Wetiko (Soul Virus). The background is gold leaf, which has a wonderful luster. The companion piece to this one has (my favorite) purple tulips and some white poppies … same gold background and window boxes. And of course a yellow dragon. All the pandemic paintings have a slightly more painterly style, which is an evolution for me …. unintentional … it just started happening … mainly because I’m trying to work faster. My good friend and mentor, Michael Kampen-O’Riley used to say that one day my formal and sketchy approaches would merge into one highly energetic style …. and that it would be my best work. Still not sure what I think about that, but these recent paintings are certainly a new, synthesized hand. It will be interesting to see if this development plays out in portraiture …. guess we’ll see later this week.

Wells Fargo Plaza

Spirit Square

Dead Soldiers in the Snow

John Singer Sargent is one of the truly great American painters. He, along with Grant Wood, have been huge influences on me … Sargent for his beautiful portraits, and Wood for his Voice.

Quickly … I have two favorite Sargent stories. Here’s the first — Sargent was a few years behind Whistler in his portrait career, and for a time, when they were both working in London, Whistler was by far the more prominent. (Plus, Whistler was a crazy public character, and Sargent was shy and private.) Anyway, Whistler was commanding big fees for his work … and no doubt about it … his work was magnificent. But so was Sargent’s! In fact, I think his portraiture was better than his older contemporary’s because Whistler’s work was about Whistler — and Sargent’s was about his subject. So what would happen frequently, as the story goes, is that a potential Whistler client, when unable to afford his so-spendy work, would be referred to Sargent because “his fees are half mine, and the work is decent.” Believe me, Whistler’s cast-offs came out better in the end.

Another Sargent tale is about something else I aspire to understand — Beauty. He saw beauty everywhere. Period. Case in point: during WW1 Harpers Magazine hired Sargent as a wartime painter. He was sent to the front lines to render scenes of horror and devastation, in watercolor, and he did. But ultimately Harpers had to let him go … his paintings were too beautiful. Even confronted with the ultimate ugliness of dead soldiers in the snow, he surrendered to the spell of beauty.

I know more about that process — feeling only the beauty of a thing — than I did a few weeks ago. As of my last post, on 17 March, I was unable to carry on with studio-business-as-usual given our monster at the gate. I went into my beloved Charlotte to sketch empty streets. But here’s the rub: it’s spring. The world is blooming, and delicious color is everywhere. I could feel the underlying menace, but I couldn’t see it.

In the sketches I found myself rendering the scenes with a warped perspective … linear perspective I mean. It’s the way you make objects appear to recede into the distance. We typically use linear perspective (object size) and atmospheric perspective (the lightness of the hues) to create the illusion of receding shapes. So anyway … with this first painting … the colors were beautiful, but the perspective was all wrong. I moved the vanishing points for the skyscrapers way, way down … to create structurally impossible angles … at first just to turn the sky area into a triangle (I always construct things in triangles) … but somehow the result was an ominous “sky-is-falling” feeling, without the accompanying “she just doesn’t know how to draw” concern (hopefully).

This is the first of several … 1 of 19 … maybe 19. Angel versus Coronavirus. Or some variation on that idea. My mother has warned me that, “Not everybody wants an angel in their painting … and NOBODY wants a coronavirus in their painting!” She may be right … guess we will see.

Street Easel

In the past few days the world has become a very different place. Isolation, now mandated by Covid-19, has never been a problem for me. In fact, my only problem with isolation is that I like it too much … probably more than is healthy. But yesterday, after my two research projects froze, I got back to work on Garden … or … I tried to.

This is a big painting for me … literally big … and also significant in a way I’m struggling to articulate. This painting has been on pause for five years … like the world is now. I didn’t finish it because I wasn’t artist enough … until now. You may like this painting … or you may dislike it. But I don’t think people will be indifferent to it. Garden puts a stake in the ground. It defines a specific artistic ideology and style for me. It will be the lead painting in an upcoming solo show later this year at my new home — 811 Gallery … soon to be open in Charlotte.

There’s nothing wrong with pouring emotion into a painting … I believe it’s the difference between merely competent art and GREAT ART. The emotion built in to the architecture of the work comes back out to the viewer. But the emotion I felt yesterday in the studio was some kind of crazy. Every time I picked up a brush I started to cry. Finally I gave up and binged on space movies and meatball curry.

…. this is the morning after. And just like avoiding a person who has hurt you … I don’t want to see Garden today … or any other painting in the studio. The beast that’s making me cry is in the streets, the stores, the office buildings, the parks … and I have to go out there and take a look at it. Before you learn to paint, you learn to see. And you don’t see a thing unless you look at it … look at it in a way that you cease to feel separation from it.

So I’m packing up my field easel … here we go.