More Feeling Than Memory: Flowing Leaves, A Swirl of Fish

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abstact, abstract art, art, creative process, inspiration, Mixed Media, painting, watercolor

Lately I’ve been leaning toward the abstract in my painting, but it’s hard to resist that representational pull. Especially when trying to capture a feeling grounded in memory, like a swirl of fish, or flowing leaves.

I came closer to the abstract with the flowing leaves. Here I was trying to capture what I felt when watching the wind streaming through the birch trees during my morning meditation. It was mesmerizing, the way the wind played with those strands of leaves. Like fingers gently parting,  lifting, letting go. All that light filtering through. I couldn’t get enough of it. I’ve caught something of that here, I think, but not enough.

This was done with oil pastel and watercolor, with a touch of gold acrylic to add sparkle.

 

For the swirling fish, I was looking for a mosaic effect.  Like what I saw on the walls and floors of ancient ruins when sailing through the Med in Cyprus, Turkey, Greece, and Malta. Like what I saw beneath the surface of the sea when I was snorkeling, swirls of color fractured by light.

The oil pastel-watercolor combo lends itself to that effect, although I didn’t quite accomplish what I had set out to do. Still I like it well enough.

I’m at the place now where I think I need to work in series, painting one after another of the same theme or subject, playing, practicing, seeing how close I can get to what I hold, not so much in my mind’s eye, but in some deeper more inarticulate place. That scattering of light through leaves. That swirl of sea and fish, broken into tiny bits of brilliant color.

More feeling than memory drives the urge to capture what I experienced then. What I experience still when I close my eyes and allow that felt-sense to rise up deep within.

 

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New Paintings – Tangled Limbs, Roots & Rocks

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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.

 

Fascinating Faces, Tao & the Arts

Tags

art, Asian Art Museum, humanity, Philosophy, sculpture, spirituality, Tao Te Ching, Zen

Some works of art speak to you on a level that is hard to define. You gaze and are drawn inward. Something in you identifies with what you see there. It’s not outside, it’s in here. It was there before you saw it, and the seeing is just a reminder of its presence.

I felt that way when viewing some of the artwork at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. Especially in the faces that follow. The one above is my favorite. I cannot help smiling when I see it. I’ve paired the faces with a few favorite Tao verses and Zen anecdotes that capture a glimpse of what I see in each face.

THE MONK – OH SO DELICIOUS

Once there was a monk fleeing for his life, a tiger at his heels, chasing him over the edge of a cliff where he grabs hold of a branch.  He dangles there just out of reach of the tiger’s snapping jaws, while below another tiger is snapping at his feet.  No escape.  Just then he notices a fat juicy strawberry dangling from a nearby vine. He plucks it loose and pops it into his mouth.  “Oh, so delicious!” he sighs.

THE SAGE – WHERE WONDER RISES

“From mystery to further mystery is the entrance to all wonders.”  -Tao Te Ching, (Ch. I)

THE SAVANT – RIDING THE WIND

“My eye becomes my ear, my ear becomes my nose, my nose my mouth. My bone and my flesh melt away. I cannot tell by what my body is supported or what my feet walk upon. I am blowing away, east and west, as a dry leaf torn from a tree. I cannot even tell whether the wind is riding on me or I am riding on the wind.”  -Lieh Tzu

THE MYSTIC – WHO AM I?

“Once I dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering here and there. Suddenly I awoke and was surprised to be myself again. Now, how can I tell whether I am a man who dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly who dreams she is a man?” Chuang Tzu

THE MOTHER – OBTAINING THE ONE

Knowing the Male,
But staying with the Female,
One becomes the humble Valley of the World. – Tao Te Ching (Ch.XXVIII)

There was something complete and nebulous
Which existed before Heaven and Earth,
Silent, invisible,
Unchanging, standing as One
Unceasing, ever-evolving,
Able to be the Mother-of-the-World.  – (Ch. XXV)

Immersed in One’s Art

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abstract art, art, Helen Frankenthaler, inspiration, the creative process, women, writing

There’s something immensely satisfying to see Helen Frankenthaler immersed in her art this way. I found this image on Facebook, along with the following quotation:

“I’ve seen women insist on cleaning everything in the house before they could sit down to write . . . and you know it’s a funny thing about housecleaning . . . it never comes to an end. Perfect way to stop a woman. A woman must be careful to not allow over-responsibility (or over-respectabilty) to steal her necessary creative rests, riffs, and raptures. She simply must put her foot down and say no to half of what she believes she ‘should’ be doing. Art is not meant to be created in stolen moments only.”
― Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Why is it we women (is it only women?) too often put our personal passions last in line behind all else?

I’m trying more and more to put those passions (my writing, painting, music-making) first on my list of to-do’s. But it’s hard. Somehow even blogging comes first, although it too is writing, a kind of art-making. Or at least I try to make it so.

Perhaps because I’ve set firmer deadlines for my blog, or I see it as a commitment I’ve made, to keep this up and running, to not let readers go too long without hearing from me. And blogging is just another way for me to “riff and rapture” about the things I love, to share what inspires me with the world.

Still, to imagine myself immersed in my art as she is in this photo, surrounded by bright splashes of color, my bare legs curled beneath me on the cold floor, and that Mona Lisa smile, that dark gaze . . . it does my heart good.

More of her artwork

   

“Divine Bodies” at the Asian Art Museum

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art, Asian Art Museum, Buddhism, Divine Bodies, Hinduism, photography, sacred art, sculpture, transcendence, transcience, transformation

During my trip to San Francisco last weekend we visited the Asian Art Museum, which was featuring an exhibition of “Divine Bodies,” sacred artwork from Asia. The theme was transformation and transcendence, and the various aspects of divinity as embodied by the Beautiful, the Sensuous, the Fierce, and the Gentle.

I’ll share a few of my favorites below.

A wooden statue of Avlokiteshvara, the compassionate bodhisattva who “gazes down” at the people with eyes full of sympathetic understanding, embodies The Gentle aspect of the Divine.

Below, another “Gentle,” this time of the Buddha, with outstretched hand and lowered gaze. The faces, the gazes, of these two are so similar they could be the same embodiment, although from different times and cultures.

Some of my favorites were the female deities.

Here Parvati, wife of Shiva, represents the female energy of the universe. She embodies The Beautiful, The Sensuous, and The Gentle, with the partial figure of her babe on her knee.

The two below embody The Sensuous, the first representing the link between the female form and fertility, with the woman holding a flowering tree branch. The second is the Buddhist deity Guhyasamaja, meaning “hidden union” of apparent opposites: male and female, mind and body, wisdom and compassion.

The phallic emblem below is a powerful representation of Shiva as the cosmic creator.

The following two represent The Fierce aspect of the Divine, powerful enough to transmute the negative force of attachment into wisdom, although these were found on other floors of the museum.

The Divine Body exhibition also included some intriguing modern art installations. My favorite was Impermanence: The Time of Man by David Hodge, a multichannel video installation with various people off the street speaking about the transience of their own lives, in all its frightening and illuminating aspects.

Another by Dayanita Singh featured the transformations of Mona Ahmed, who says that God gave her a man’s body but a woman’s spirit, and that is why they call her Hijra. In India this is considered a third gender and is closely associated with the divine. Her faces follow.

I can see why the artist found her face so fascinating and timeless.

Compare it to the ancient one below, seemingly the same embodiment, transcending time as well as gender.

Scattered throughout the exhibition were quotations mounted on the walls. Two follow.

“Mind has no body distinct from his soul, for that called body is a portion of the soul discerned by the five senses.” – William Blake, poet and artist.

“And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell, and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being.” – Black elk, Oglala Lakota (Sioux) spiritual leader

I found so much more at this museum that fascinated and inspired me, but I’ll save the rest for a later post.

 

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.

“Water Falling Through Sunlight” – Poem & Paintings for Troubled Times

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Amy Lowell, art, Emil Nolde, inspiration, JMW Turner, Paintings, poem, poetry

JMW Turner – Sunrise with sea Monstors

September, 1918

This afternoon was the color of water falling through sunlight;

The trees glittered with the tumbling of leaves;

The sidewalks shone like alleys of dropped maple leaves,

And the houses ran along them laughing out of square, open windows.

Under a tree in the park,

Two little boys, lying flat on their faces,

Were carefully gathering red berries

To put in a pasteboard box.

Some day there will be no war,

Then I shall take out this afternoon

And turn it in my fingers,

And remark the sweet taste of it upon my palate,

And note the crisp variety of its flights of leaves.

Today I can only gather it

And put it into my lunch-box,

For I have time for nothing

But the endeavor to balance myself

Upon a broken world.

by Amy Lowell

Emil Nolde – Dark Mountain Landscape

Bearing Witness – Art that Hurts, Art that Heals

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art, bearing witness, creative process, creativity, Deborah J. Brasket, From the Far Ends of the Earth, healing, pain, writing

So much of art-making is bearing witness–to things we love, to things that wound. And often they are the same things: The beauty that breaks your heart. The brutality that tears it open and lets the light in.

The image above, Rodin’s seven-foot bronze study for his most famous sculpture “The Burghers of Calais,” is art that hurts, and heals. It tells the story of how six citizens during France’s Hundred Year War with England volunteered to sacrifice themselves to save the town. The sculpture shows the pain and suffering, self-doubt and determination of the men as they are led away to captivity. It bears witness to that cruelty, that self-sacrifice, that love. How it’s all wrapped together.

This need to bear witness to how it’s all wrapped together is not new. It’s been written over and over again by poets and artists though the ages. I’ve written about it here on these pages, in my homage to Marc Clamage’s paintings of the homeless, in my meditations upon a deer’s scream and my mother’s death, and the beauty and brutality in the hills of Vietnam.

Not surprisingly I write about it in my novel From the Far Ends of the Earth. And I write about it there in terms of art-making, how turning the underbelly outward in our art can be a healing process, how it lets the light in. For the artist and the viewer.

“If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it?” Franz Kafka once asked. “What we must have are those books which come upon us like ill-fortune, and distress us deeply, like the death of one we love better than ourselves. . . . A book must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.”

Gwendolyn Brooks wrote:

Does man love Art? Man visits Art, but squirms.
Art hurts. Art urges voyages–
and it is easier to stay at home,
the nice beer ready.

What we see and experience out there in the world and in our own hearts bears witnessing. Not only the beauty, but the brutality as well. While the first lifts us up and makes us soar, the latter throws us down in the pit. It confounds us, it confuses us, it demolishes us.  It makes us want to stand up on our hind feet and howl. It makes us want to cut open our wrists and bleed out our anguish on the page. It makes us want to splash our pain in brilliant colors across the canvas.

It makes us rage against the night, and at the very same time trace the frgile broken bones of the milky way across the sky with awe and wonder.

It’s the roil of chaos that boils over into stars and star-dust, and becomes the tender, naked beauty of an infant’s breath.

We cannot help writing about it, welding it into our art, because it is us, and we are it. It’s the thing we were born to bear witness to, when we are awake to do so.

 

Perfect Pairings – Klee and cummings

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abstract art, art, creativity, e.e. cummings, inspiration, painting, Paul Klee, poems, poetry

I’ve long been a huge fan of Paul Klee’s paintings and e.e. cummings’ poetry, and for similar reasons: their playfulness and sense of excitement, as if “bursting with something very important and precise to say.,” as one critic writes of cummings’ work.

They dared to take their art in new and often jarring directions, playing with syntax and form, with color and composition. The reader/viewer is forced to see things in a new way. To question old ways of looking at the world.

Beneath the playfulness, something deeper is going on. Each bends toward the light.

“Everything passes, and what remains of former times, what remains of life, is the spiritual. In everything we do, the claim of the Absolute is unchanging.” – Paul Klee

“Love is the voice under all silences, the hope which has no opposite in fear; the strength so strong mere force is feebleness: the truth more first than sun, more last than star.” – e.e. cummings

A few favorites of each follows.

[in Just-]

BY E. E. CUMMINGS

in Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman

whistles far and wee

and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it’s
spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer
old balloonman whistles
far and wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it’s
spring
and

the

goat-footed

balloonMan whistles
far
and
wee

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond

By E. E. Cummings, 1894 – 1962

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain, has such small hands

Ta-Da! My New Home Studio

Tags

art, art studio, creativity, inspiration, office space, painting, personal, writing

After having pumped it up, I hope it isn’t a let-down to those who have been waiting to see it, as promised.

Ir’s certainly not as exciting or whimsical as so many of the studios posted on these pages that have inspired me. But it’s mine. And it does say something about me, I think, being practical, inexpensive, yet filled with color and things I love that inspire me.

My husband made me this long wall-to-wall desk top out of pine planks stained a red oak. It sits on inexpensive Ikea knock-offs, purchased online through Office Depot that are surprisingly solid and well-made.

My studio features two work stations, one for writing and one for painting. I bought inexpensive cubes on Amazon to keep my desktop organized and to keep photos of ;my loved ones near. An odd assortment of cups and jars and baskets keep my paints and brushes tidy and handy.

I re-purposed this portable laptop table as a way to extend my painting work space. It slips under the desk when not in use.

The focal point of the room is this large blue wall hanging featuring two colorful molas from the San Blas islands when we were sailing through the Panama Canal.

The many layers of fabric cut and sewn together with such  tiny stitches amazes me.

Another fabric favorite hangs next to this old blue couch that I bought at Pier One Import years ago. It folds out into a single bed, not very comfortable, but well used over the years.

I bought the fabric hanging at a county fair years ago. Again, the tiny details amaze me.

The room also features the flags we saved from our around-the-world sailing adventure. They’ve been stored rolled up in a box till now.

When entering a new port it was protocol to fly the flag of the host county as well as our own. My daughter made several of these on an old portable foot-pumped sewing machine that fellow yachties gave her.

I’d planned on buying a counter-height craft table full of fun cubby holes for storing stuff that I found on Amazon. I wanted a place where I could stand to work when I wanted and extra space to create collage paper and spread out the pages of my novel-in-progess when in the process of reorganizing and revising pages.

But I couldn’t bear parting with the super-handy lateral filing cabinet that had been part of my old office. So my husband used that as  base for an island, putting it on wheels and using the old desk-top perched on extenders to create a large island that I could roll out of the way when not in use.

In this photo it’s holding the two thick binders with drafts of the novel I’m currently working on. In the cubbyhole beneath I store old paintings, magazines, etcetera.

When we bought this home in foreclosure all the closet doors were missing for some reason. So I put up a curtain instead and decided that I like it, and so it remains.

There’s my bookcase, of course, one of several throughout our home, more books than I’ll ever finish I’m sure, especially now since my Kindle is put to such good use too.

And then there’s my own artwork, scattered through-out the room. I have to hang it somewhere, and it does inspire me to want to create more.

I hope you enjoyed this little tour. The room is still a work in progress. I need new window coverings and a new desk chair. And I’m eager to shop through some flea markets and antique stores for more fun and inspiring containers and curiosities to add to my shelves and desktop. But essentially it’s done, and I’m happy with it.