New Paintings – Tangled Limbs, Roots & Rocks

Tags

art, Nature, painting, trees, watercolor

I haven’t been painting this year as much as last. But I wanted to share a few that will probably find a place on my wall. All of them are a mix of watercolor and oil pastel, which I’ve been playing with a lot lately.

I’ve included two paintings in this post, both proof of my love affair with trees. The one above, Roots and Rocks, is from a nearby creek bed. I love the way the roots of the old oak hug the rocks around it. The reference photo is below.

Paintings always look better when matted.

The second painting, Tangled Limbs, and its reference photo are below.

This is one of the rare paintings which I think looks better the closer you get to it, where you can see the texture and marks better.

You can’t see it in the reference photo, but the light streaming through those limbs was dazzling. I tried to capture a bit of that by dripping on yellow paint from the top.

I’ll have a couple more paintings to share soon.

 

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Music Like Waves, Rising, Dispersing

Tags

inspiration, John Rutter, murmuration, music, poetry, Requiem, Robert Ojaki, self-similarity, starlings

Zdislaw Beksinski

I came across this poem on one of my favorite blogs O at the Edges.

I love the image of the wave losing itself in dispersal only to rise again, just as music does in the playing, even in the inner repetitions, remaking itself.

Just as memory does, rising from mysterious depths only to disappear again.

Like murmuring starlings, spilling patterns across the sky.

So much “self-similarity” weaving this world together.

I leave you with three gifts: the poem that inspired me, the music that inspired him, and the wonder of murmuring birds.

Requiem

By Robert Ojaki

That it begins.
And like a wave which appears
only to lose itself

in dispersal, rising whole again
yet incomplete in all but
form, it returns.

Music. The true magic.

Each day the sun passes over the river,
bringing warmth to it. Such

devotion inspires movement: a cello in the
darkness, the passage of sparrows. Sighs.

The currents are of our own
making. If we listen do we also

hear? These bodies. These silent voices.

* * *

“Requiem” was written in the 80s, in response to John Rutter’s Requiem. 

 

 

Recognition for “Slow Swirl at the Edge of Time”

Tags

abstract art, art, Mixed Media, painting, watercolor

I entered a local art show for the first time this month and was surprised and pleased to get recognition for my work, one of my personal favorites. I wrote about this work a few months ago, my first abstract painting, which I enjoyed quite a bit. Later I wrote about how I came to name it, although I “renamed” it for this show. The theme was “Light” so I called it “Light Swirl at the Edge of Time,” still fitting, I think (smile).

I used watercolor and oil pastel. so it was entered under a broad category of 3D, glass, and mixed media. During my turn as docent for the show one rainy day last week, I shot a few photos.

I’ve been doing more writing than painting these last few months. But the few I’ve worked on have all been watercolor and oil pastel. I love the texture it creates in combination, the way the watercolor washes over and puddles between the oil marks, the way the pastel adds sparkle, and how the two together sometimes gives the work an almost mosaic quality.

I’ll share some of these later, but for now my little “Swirl” gets center stage.

On Mist & Fog, Endless Emerging Forms

Tags

beauty, Deborah J. Brasket, fog, life, Mist, Nature, Philosophy, photography, Science

By Don Hong-Oai

I’ve long been drawn to images of fog and mist.  Part of it is the feel for the ephemeral and mysterious, things half formed, half hidden.  Emerging from a soft nebulous background but not fully formed.

Things caught in a state of transition, in the midst of becoming what is or could be.  Or slowly dissolving back into mere mist or shadow, what was or could have been.

Some of my fascination has to do with the contrast between the softness and starkness of the images, how things are reduced to their elemental forms the way black and white photos will do.

All but the starkest, darkest trunks and branches revealed while the fog swallows the rest.  All that’s left is the essential, the finely sculpted, restrained and elegant.

Bare branches naked and exposed, lifted in soft white hands

I think images of mist and fog speak to me because they ring true.  They reveal in stark and dreamy notes how ephemeral it all is, this life we live, the forms and forces of nature. All in flux, in constant motion, emerging and dissolving over and over, without end.

The first law of thermodynamics states how energy changes from one form to another, but never disappears.

The new fourth law proposed by some scientists is still uncertain, but moving toward the emergent, a law of motion where things are constantly pushed to the edge of chaos and the brink of “perpetual novelty,” an immense field of endless potentiality.

I see that too in these photos.

At noon in full summer, in the bright sunshine, with all our leaves shimmering, richly detailed, brimming lushly, dripping with  color, we hold life firmly in hand, our hearts aching with joy, with the pure bliss of being, and we think we will last forever.

 

But when the day is in transition, at dawn or dusk, emerging from darkness or drifting toward it, when mist or fog hides all but the faint essential lines of life, we see a starker and at the same time softer reality.  But just as beautiful, and just as enduring.

For what could be more constant and eternal than the fleeting?

Or that which emerges, fragile and half-formed, from the fertile wombs of earth and stars, seas and seeds, dreams and desires and the lusts of ages that brought us all to the brink of being.

[Adapted from a 2012 post]

Three Florals & Two Landscapes

Tags

acrylic, art, flowers, Paintings, watercolor

As summer was turning to fall most of my painting was focused on florals and learning to create with acrylics. I’m not sure I like it as much as watercolor yet, but I see its potential. My first attempt was a blue vase of red roses from our garden. It’s sitting on a table near a window. I wanted to capture the simple, feminine shape of the vase and curling petals against the angular background, that cool blue surrounded by all that warmth.  I liked that I could paint over mistakes better with acrylics than with watercolor, and I loved the brilliance of the colors. It was painted on a student grade canvas “skin.” What I don’t like is how it seems to sit on the surface rather than being part of the paper, as you get with watercolor.

Next was a landscape on a canvas panel, which I’m fairly happy with. For a first attempt.

After that came a couple of abstracts, neither satisfactory, as least “yet. ” I think there’s some potential at least with the abstract landscape below. Something’s still missing. The upper left-hand corner is calling to me. We’ll see.

Then I turned back to watercolor, some wet-on-wet work, which I’m not altogether happy with. I think the composition is too linear. I wish I had allowed some of the flowers to spill down on the right side toward the bottom of the page. Maybe I’m not done with this one either.

Finally I turned to painting a companion piece for a watercolor I already have on the wall, one of my first florals. I think this yellow one will go nicely with the pink and I’m happy enough with it to find it “wall-worthy.”

 

In the meantime, I’m still working on my office/art studio conversion so I have more room to spread out and work on more than one piece at once.

“Slow Swirl at the Edge of Time”

Tags

abstract, abstract art, art, creative process, creativity, Mixed Media, painting, watercolor

“Slow Swirl at the Edge of Time” watercolor and oil pastel by Deborah J Brasket

This naming of this painting did not come “like a conversation between two lovers,” as the name of my last painting did.  The one came suddenly, serendipitously, like a gift.

While pondering what to call this painting, I opened a post by the Humble Fabulist and saw this whimsical painting by Rothko, and it’s equally whimsical naming. I fell in love with the name.  “Slow swirl at the Edge of the Sea.”

Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea, 1944. Oil on canvas || Mark Rothko

Having had such a long romance with the sea, it conjured up all sorts of ideas and images that I immediately wanted to paint, a whole series, I thought.

But then I glimpsed my unnamed painting waiting so patiently there, propped on top a bookcase, leaning against a wall.

In another post writing about the process of painting it I wrote:

In the end, this piece reminds me of the night sky, with its swirling galaxies, shooting stars, and so on.  Although intentionally, as hat wasn’t what I had started out to create, I think my love for the night sky, that mystery and romance, was expressed here subconsciously.

All that deep blue and turquoise and swirling motion still makes me think of deep space, the edge of the universe, the end of time, and how in reality there is no “edge,” no “end” to any of it.  The thought of that “endlessness” seems to swirl around and around in our minds because we cannot quite grasp the fact of it.

So I knew then what the painting was trying to tell me, and so named it.

But the idea of a series of paintings about the sea, the ocean, remains. About what it brings up out of me, the gifts it lays at our feet, the ease its motion gives our eyes, our bodies, our minds. It’s unfathomable depths and expanses. It’s hidden treasures.

I’m keen to see what this idea will bring forth.

My Undersea Gardens

Tags

art, Nature, painting, sailing, sea life, snorkeling, undersea garden, watercolor

One of our favorite things to do when we were sailing was swimming through the undersea gardens that lay hidden in the coves where we anchored. We would climb into our dinghy and row toward the rocks then dive overboard. My daughter and I would go one way with our net “goody bags,” and my husband and son would go the other way with their spear guns.

We’d spend hours just snorkeling and diving, watching and chasing fish, looking for shells and scallops, and just watching the marvelous show with all its colorful array of sea life. The coral beds waving in the current, the tiny shimmering schools of fish, the eels peeking out from dark caves,  the small reef sharks at the far edge of our vision watching us like guard dogs, the dazzling display of fractured light streaming down from above.

I tried to capture some of that in these paintings, especially the two abstracted scenes. I wanted to capture the feel of dazzling colors and shapes and not quite being able to identify what everything was because the scene moved and changed so quickly with the flowing current and water and darting sea life.

Here I drew in a few shapes, the fish at the center, and coral on either side. Then drew slanting wavy “light” lines crisscrossing each other all through the paper. I added some markings and stippling with oil pastel, then painted each fractured shape different colors.

In the end, the coral shape on the right looked more like a turtle so I went with that, adding an eye. Other shapes looked like fish or the tail of a sting ray, but they could be something else.  I liked this so much I painted a companion piece, something to keep it company.

This one features a sting ray as well as more fish and sea-weed, some planned, and some created through the fractured light lines.

I created a more traditional underwater sea scene too, as you can see in the first photo of all the gardens above. But the abstracted ones capture more of the “feel” of swimming through those landscapes, being overwhelmed by the color and beauty, and constantly surprised by what you find, and knowing that you are missing so much that still lies hidden from view.

Night Howl, Deep in My Bones

Tags

Consciousness, memoir, Nature, poetry, sailing, universe

Last month around this time when the moon was full, our nights were filled with howling. Almost every night we could hear the mournful cries of coyotes in the fields behind our house, along with ecstatic barking, yipping, chortling–as if they were celebrating a kill, or worshipping the moon, or engaged in some wild orgy.  Or perhaps they were merely giving voice to the irresistible life force pumping through their blood and brains and hearts, a force of nature too wild and fierce to hold back.

The sound, terrifying and exhilarating at the same time, echoed long in my mind afterwards, like ripples of water moving away to the edge of consciousness and reverberating back again. Like something heard long ago deep in my bones, from an evolutionary or primal past.

They say we humans carry in our genes the imprint of life-forms going back to when the first cells emerged on earth.  Deep in our blood, our bones, our very atoms, lays some faint memory of our ancient beginnings. Phylogenists call it our “vast evolutionary tree.”

If we go back even further, traces of that time when the morning stars first sang together may still be felt when we look out on the night sky. We are the stuff of stars, after all, so say astrophysicists.

Carl Jung envisioned our Collective Unconscious as a reservoir lying deep within our psyches containing our evolutionary memories.  While they lay below consciousness, they break through in dreams and myths and fairy tales, in primitive urges, the call of the wild, in our more-than-human yearnings.

Sometimes we feel this wildness rising within when witnessing powerful displays of nature: thunderstorms booming across the land, waterfalls careening over cliffs, huge waves crashing against rocks, hurricanes lashing at trees, lightening forking across a dark sky,  earthquakes heaving beneath our feet.   It frightens and excites—creating both the desire to escape and to embrace that primordial power.  One wild howl elicits another—the urge to howl back, to voice our own wild yearnings—to sing or dance, or paint or play, or grab words from the air and fling them onto paper. I heard that howl and answered back one night on anchor watch in Pago Pago.  A hurricane was blowing a few miles off Samoa and we were set to ride it out if it blew into the bay.

I stood at the bow of La Gitana, hanging onto the staysail as the deck lurched beneath my feet like a wild stallion while the surging waves rose and fell and the chain from the anchor rooted deep in the mud below grew slack or tight.

Overhead a torrent of clouds crashed against a full moon, sometimes swallowing it whole, then washing away streaming moonlight. All around me the night raged while the anchor held tight, and I held tight, the terror and exhilaration pumping through my blood and brain.  The wild urge to let go and be carried away by the night was fierce. Later I tried to capture what it felt like.   Here’s what I wrote:

NIGHT HOWL

(Anchor watch in Pago Pago, Samoa)

Alone beneath a wild and ragged night I watch,

                            moonlight and clouds wind-tangled across the sky.

Suddenly I am loosened, lifted, flung far–

fingers raking stars, mouth howling moon, mind mooning time

my heart-beat

riddles the universe.

Alone beneath a wild and ragged night I stand, astonished,

gaping into the maw of some vast mirror.

It’s close to capturing what I felt, but the last two lines trouble me. “Gaping” and “maw” keeps the visceral effect I’m looking for, capturing the sense of trance-like awe and terror.  But mirror moves it away into something more philosophical or intellectual.

I’m tempted to stop with the line “my heartbeat riddles the universe.” That captures the physicality of my wildly beating heart breaking out of my body to become the heart-beat of the universe.  And it also hints at the mystery of human heartbeat itself being a riddle, the riddle of the universe, that the evolution of the universe over eons led to the creation of a human being, whose heart—its essential being—is the ability to reflect back upon the universe, to take it all in.

Human consciousness is the mirror through which the universe sees and knows itself, and through which we see and know ourselves—the fullness of being, our primal past and present standing face to face.

That’s a lot to howl about.

[Reposted from July 2012]

Stepping Barefoot into Reality with D.T. Suzuki

Tags

books, Buddhism, D.T. Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism, Metaphysics, Philosophy, spirituality, Zen

I love this photo of the Zen sage D.T Suzuki. He was one of my first “gurus” if I, or he, believed in such things. His “Essays in Zen Buddhism” certainly was a huge influence in my life, as he was for so many, including Martin Heidegger, Thomas Merton, Carl Jung, Alan Watts, and John Cage.

So I was excited to find this photo and article about him on Maria Popova’s fascinating website Brainpickings. Many of the quotations she includes were ones I highlighted in my dog-eared copy so long ago. I highly recommend you reading her article on “How Zen Can Help You Cultivate Your Character.”

What I love about Suzuki’s approach to Zen is its emphasis on the psychological and the practical, and the turning away from the merely logical and rational, or verbal.

“The truth of Zen is the truth of life,” he writes, “and life means to live, to move, to act, not merely to reflect.”

He goes on to explain:

“In the actual living of life there is no logic, for life is superior to logic. We imagine logic influences life, but in reality man is not a rational creature so much as we make him out; of course he reasons, but he does not act according to the result of his reasoning pure and simple. There is something stronger than ratiocination.”

“Zen is to be explained, if at all explained it should be, rather dynamically than statically. When I raise the hand thus, there is Zen. But when I assert that I have raised the hand, Zen is no more there.”

“Zen therefore ought to be caught while the thing is going on, neither before nor after.”

We must see directly into the thing in itself as itself, into the “suchness” of life: “responding to a call, listening to a murmuring stream, or to a singing bird, or any of our most ordinary everyday assertions of life.”

To do this: “We must first of all acquire a new point of view of looking at things, which is altogether beyond our ordinary sphere of consciousness.”

When we do: “The old world of the sense has vanished, and something entirely new has come to take its place. We seem to be in the same objective surrounds, but subjectively we are rejuvenated, we are born again.”

Yet this new “sphere of consciousness” must be grounded in our practical, ordinary lives.

“Psychologically there is a most intimate and profound relationship between a practical turn of mind and a certain type of mysticism .  .  .  If mysticism is true its truth must be a practical one, verifying itself in every act of ours, and most decidedly, not a logical one.”

He goes on to quote the Zen poet Hokoji:

“How wondrously supernatural,

and how miraculous this!

I draw water, and I carry fuel.”

This too is what I love about Suzuki’s approach to Zen, his emphasis on work, and on work as love.

“For the soundness of ideas must be tested finally by their practical application. When they fail in this–that is, when they cannot be carried out in everyday life producing lasting harmony and satisfaction and giving real benefit to all concerned–to oneself as well as to others–no ideas can be said to be sound and practical.”

“The fact is that if there is any one thing that is most emphatically insisted upon by the Zen maters as the practical expression of their faith, it is serving others, doing work for others: not ostentatiously, indeed, but secretly without making others know of it. Says Eckhart [Christian mystic], ‘What a man takes in by contemplation he must pour out in love.’ Zen would say, ‘pour out in work,’ meaning by work the active and concrete realization of love.”

Throughout his essays he quotes generously from Zen masters and poets, and from Christian mystics and other Western thinkers and philosophers. Thus he weaves together common threads as well as pointing out differences between Zen and Western philosophies and spiritual practices.

Popova calls his essays “a moral toolkit for modern living, delivered through a grounding yet elevating perspective on secular spirituality.”

I would have to agree with that. Certainly I used it as a “toolkit” for my own own understanding of Zen and its application to ordinary life.

Suzuki writes:

“Life as it is lived suffices. It is only when the disquieting intellect steps in and tries to murder it that we stop to live and imagine ourselves to be short of or in something. Let the intellect alone, it has its usefulness in its proper sphere, but let it not interfere with the flowing of the life-stream. If you are at all tempted to look into it, do so while letting it flow.

Zen . . . must be directly and personally experienced by each of us in his inner spirit. Just as two stainless mirrors reflect each other, the fact and our own spirits must stand facing each other with no intervening agents. When this is done we are able to seize upon the living, pulsating fact itself.

That is what I work to do:

To grasp the fact of life and its sufficeness with bare hands.

To “step barefoot into reality” as the poet puts it.

Although, too often this is forgotten in the busyness of things, the turmoil and petty pleasures that swirl around us all and steal our attention.

But I’m beginning to understand that even these upsets and petty pleasures have a place within the larger scheme of things, if only we would see them as such:

Oh, how wondrously supernatural,

and miraculous this!

The spilled cup, the dime novel.”

In a life that suffices, nothing is wasted.

 

 

California Dreaming

Tags

art, Big Sur, California, Morro Bay Rock, Paintings, photography, scenic views, watercolor

McWay Falls in Julia Pfeiffer Burns Sate Park, Big Sur, California

Two of my paintings are being shown at a local gallery this month. They are part of an exhibition titled “For Love of Central & Coastal California.”

One is a view of iconic Morro Bay Rock as seen from the top of Highway 46, not far from where we live. It is one of my favorite views, especially in the spring with the green hills folding down to the sea. In the actual view from the highway, Morro Rock can barely be seen, even on a clear day. But one of the wonderful things about painting is that you can move things around and make them smaller or larger to fit your vision and what you want to capture.

View of Morro Rock from Highway 46, watercolor by Deborah J. Brakset

This painting was a composite of the following two photographs that I took not long ago. I tried to capture the intense green hills and their shadows from the first photo, and more detail of the ravines that spider up the far hills in the second. I made the hills steeper than they actually are and emphasized the road dipping into the folds.

The second painting on display is a view of a hidden sea cave as seen from Highway 1 near Big Sur.

Sea Cave, Big Sur, from Highway 1 – watercolor by Deborah J. Brasket

It is a composite of the following two photos, the first featuring the yellow wild flowers that grow near the highway overlooking the sea, and the second shows the cave itself in its private cove. You can barely make out the fence and pathway leading down the cliff toward the ocean in the photo.

This last painting is not part of the show but shares the theme. It is a painting of a pathway lined with oaks leading to the river near our home. A “California dreamer” leans against a tree trunk.

“A Splash of Sunlight” watercolor by Deborah J. Brasket

This is the reference photo, sans the mountain and the “dreamer” I added.

I was trying to use the colors and the looser style found in the following painting, one of my favorites by Henri Manguin.

“The Parkway”, 1905, by Henri Manguin

Mine isn’t as successful as I had hoped, but it still captures enough of that “dreamy” feeling of late afternoon, with the sun filtering down through the leaves, to want to keep it.

I hope you enjoyed this brief stroll with me through California’s  sunlit and sea-splashed hills. May you savor the natural beauty that lies in your own backyard, wherever that may be.