the boy now child now boy

That your parents are not perfect, are not Gods, isn't that a realization that is famously responsible for often great anguish, sometimes great mistakes, and one that brings with it a risk of estrangement?

Take it upon myself to remove the lingering sting from the blunt smack suffered in another's worldview.

With each day I will relax, release, a touch more.
If I let more of myself in to the relationship, the easier we will be.

I have, as a rule in my life, tried to keep a separate space for myself, both inside myself and out, where I alone go, thinking that this is how I protect my identification as an artist.

I'm wearying of holding up the fences, and all they really do is keep these flowers from those, and neighbors from talking.

I will relax, I will give in, I will wait for time to do what it does.

at any age

watching home videos clips from a month or two ago,
with happy jackson in my lap,
they might as well have been from another lifetime.
he smacked me in the face almost reflexively, his mood turned sour just watching the two of us on the screen. as had mine, seeing my oblivious smothering, seeing his righteous bewilderment.
and that smack was a reminder of why i must keep my mind focused, keep my distance, keep remembering that he isn't as needy as he wants us to believe, nor is he as mature as we want him to be, only all of 3 1/4 years old.



paint flows freely, i'm going to paint and smooth all the scraps i come across, i'm going to give them away until they start to come back, i'm going to send that big blue disc out to wisconsin, get that last monkey off my back so i can stand up straight.

or you could only eat purple food, because it's gonna get me in touch with my blood cells.



thanks jess

or you could shave some dandelion stems onto them, set them on a tray on the windowsill in the sun.

a painting of my girl libie

a big radiating roundness of joy

waves and rays and vibrating and colors just barely there from the intensity of light

bedsheets with pale colors and inks washy and pencil drawing big big big as a bed where she slept when we first brought her home

a fabric flung spread onto the surface of the wall, no dimension, no hanging, but removeable, roll it up and bring it to a new place,

maybe just tacks

maybe frayed edges of the linens,

listening to 'this unfolds', four tet.

i started this blog in a daze.

i'm on the other side of the most exhausting period of my life, and i'm setting up my studio in a brand new room, with a few paintings in my head, and a lighter heart.

new work soon

these were my aims at the beginning of this, in mid july:

to make paintings that can be held, taken off the wall, tossed in the air. to draw your eye with the paintings, please your hands as you take them from the wall, surprise you with the writing underneath, and engage your intellect as you look again at the painting, in order to reconcile what you've seen with what you've read.

to marry my intellect to my instinct. to emerge out of pure painting as movement, as fleeting expression, and to find out what my mind has to offer if given the room and the respect.

to make as many good paintings of a particular size and shape as i could within five weeks.

i met all of them.

yet i woke up this morning knowing i wouldn't sell any of the paintings. i knew i didn't care, though. it was good to have the gallery all full all night long, but it seemed that those who were there during the quieter moments had more of a connection to my pieces. they require interaction, and perhaps the closer you are to one-on-one with them, the more you can take your time and be quiet and speak with them.


here is what i learned tonight:

if i aim to make paintings that you can hold, move with, run your hands around, then i have to make objects. a well made object is one whose every facet has been considered. tonight i watched people handling my paintings as objects, and i knew immediately that they were not good enough. i had left so many surfaces unfinished, unconsidered on these pieces.

i will never do so again.