LOOK

These photos were taken of the dawning sky. If I attempted to describe its colors in words, I’d have to be a brilliant poet. If I were brave enough to put paint to canvas, I couldn’t come close to conveying how the pinks, lavenders and oranges merged and enhanced one another. My Canon SureShot is all that I have to bear witness to my view of the sky on this particular morning.

Have you ever been stopped in your tracks by the magnificence of a view? Sheer beauty, in nature, in a person, or in an artwork strikes chords in us of awe and wonder. In viewing something beautiful, we are inspired and delighted in ways that seem non-verbal and beyond our (at least my) limited communication skills. Even those of us who use art as tools or exploration and sharing can be overwhelmed by beauty which is both complex and at the same time so simple that we can’t understand why everyone in the universe isn’t struck by a vision or experience that we find beautiful.

Look Closely

A profusion of roses in July. A roomful of expectant children’s faces on the first day of kindergarten. The nave of a Gothic church. The paintings in the Museum of Fine Arts. It is easy to discern beauty in the expected places.

Out of my mid-November window, the sea and sky are composed of myriad grays, nameless (in our language) and yet distinct from one another. I wander into my yard and spy fragment of color in the dull leaves and grasses. Beacon-like, they conjure images of girls in colorful party dresses long after midnight. Their fiery crimsons, burnt oranges, and breathlessly screaming yellows have hidden dormant under summer’s conventional greens. Now it is there turn to flicker briefly before being frozen, buried, and turned to rot by rain and time. I think of a friend who is facing a milestone birthday. I think of the splendor that sometimes flares before decay, its assets brought into sharper focus on its cusp. Beauty can be sharper, more intense, more poignant, in the face of its own mortality.

I’ll end by a quotation from Dylan Thomas: “Time held me green and dying / though I sang in my chains like the sea.”

A Thousand Words

How many times in life do loved ones and friends state a decision, and then behave differently? How many times do we hear another say "no" when an underlying YES shines through that person's eyes? How many "maybes" actually mean "no, but I'm not brave enough to say that?"

I could write a treatise on the confusion, disappointment, pain and deception that is caused when people do not say what they mean or mean what they say. It would be an angst-ridden exercise.

Instead, I tried to capture this phenomena in a painting, which was enjoyable to paint and whose end product delights me. Instead of feeling depressed about humanity's indecisiveness, instead I feel protective and a little amused.

What If?

Many, many times we hear adults say that they wish they could re-experience the joy, enthusiasm, and innocence of childhood. It is easy to forget that childhood is often a place of painful inhibition and insecurity, a walking-on-eggshells game of trying to provide the “correct” emotional response in the landmine world of adults. It is not always the carefree days we prefer to harken back to.

But what if adults made a conscious effort to enjoy those very things which brought pleasure and joy in childhood? What if we felt free to eat cookies – or cookie batter – without apologies and excuses? What if adults felt free to roll down hills, spin until dizzy, howl at the moon with our dogs, or have soft-serve ice cream for dinner on a summer evening?

What if otherwise creative adults stopped making excuses for not writing, painting, singing, or dancing? What if we stopped banishing those delights to our past as things that we “used to do?” What if ignored the fear of being judged and stopped hiding behind Perfectionism long enough to send a bit of art (a poem, a song sung out loud, a photograph) out into the world? Would this sharing help others be less afraid to share poetry, even if they’re not T.S. Eliot, a painting if they’re not Picasso, or a photograph if they’re not Dorothea Lange?

What if those who read this share their unique art with the world, and report back on the joy and amusement that has been added to the world?

Can Cooking Be An Art form?

You select recipies, combining the best features of old favorites with new interests. You choose high quality ingredients, including fruits, meats and fish in season, and the appropriate herbs and spices to set off flavors. You assemble the ingredients in ways that can be savory, flavorful, piquant, comforting, or which evoke combinations of these traits. You may pay attention to presentation in order to evoke a mood, selecting color and material of serving dishes and plates, choosing the lighting that will emphasize the mood you hope to capture with the meal. Again I pose the question: can cooking be an art form?

Cross Talent

Models decide to become chanteuses on the way to the first ladyship of France. Actors decide that they are clearly cut out for political roles, and politicians appear in Saturday Night Live skits.

Despite the reputation of being a little “out there,” most writers don’t fancy themselves musicians, nor do artists often delude themselves that they will easily master the steps, fluidity, and muscle strength necessary for ballet. (Zelda Fitzgerald is an exception, and she was, clinically speaking, “out there.”) Most people, however, who are firmly dedicated to one form of artistic expression appreciate other forms, and may dabble. Although I’ve been writing since I was six, I enjoy drawing and playing the piano. Recognition that I am a poor drawer and pianist in no way diminishes my enjoyment of these activities.

My recently inspired foray into acrylic painting has led me to three insights. The first is that, realistically, I will never be a proficient painter. I lack the underlying drawing ability, its technique and its vision, which is a necessary basis for painting. I lack the training and mentorship, and it is unlikely that I’ll chose paths that will lead to immersion in the world of painting.

The second insight is that this foray allows me to appreciate on new levels precisely what painting entails, and a better sense of what I’m seeing when I look at others’ paintings. I see what goes right, because I now know first-hand how easy it is for things to go wrong in translating ideas and visions into form, color, line and texture.

The third insight is into myself. For inexplicable reasons, the act of painting fills me with joy. As a fairly perfectionistic person, I’m accustomed to dispatching into the world thoughts and ideas, written or verbal, which state exactly what I intend. I have the linguistic tools available to create poems, letters, emails, agendas, or dissertations to express precisely what I intend to express. With painting, that just isn’t going to happen! My reaction is not one of frustration, but of intense freedom. I can simply PAINT, reveling in the colors, the smells, and the motion of my hand as it makes a curve. Paintings now exist in the world that did not exist before I created them. Opinions in my house imply that the world would be just fine without these paintings, but I disagree; their creation brings me joy; their existence brings me delight. It’s a win-win situation.

Have you, as an artist, made forays into other areas of the art world, and what were your experiences?

Why write? Why paint?

These deceptively simple one-syllable words together are potent. They bear the enormously important question that has obsessed most artists at some point in their lives. When Rembrant and Picasso painted self-portraits, they were attempting to capture the figurative (and literal) artists’ eye. Modernist meta-poets like Eliot, Pound and Stevens likewise sought to explore the complex and intermingled relationship between art and reality as the creator’s mind touches upon what is perceived through the senses.

Does art depict and capture reality? Or does art create that reality?

Perhaps art and writing allow us to explore reality, to run it through individual and temperamental filters, and to choose what words, lines or colors will be used to create something visible to others and to ourselves. In this case, art provides one perspective, one version of reality. This in turn influences those who see or read it with open minds, whose own realities are influenced.

Creating art, be it painting, photography or poetry, also contains the sheer joy of creation, a celebration of the human ability to communicate nuanced emotions and ideas. Wallace Stevens explores the joy of language, and its necessity in a world which can be vulgar, banal, and menacing:


The Plot against the Giant

First Girl
When this yokel comes maundering,
Whetting his hacker,
I shall run before him,
Diffusing the civilest odors
Out of geraniums and unsmelled flowers.
It will check him.

Second Girl
I shall run before him,
Arching cloths besprinkled with colors
As small as fish-eggs.
The threads
Will abash him.

Third Girl
Oh, la...le pauvre!
I shall run before him,
With a curious puffing.
He will bend his ear then.
I shall whisper
Heavenly labials in a world of gutturals.
It will undo him.
"Harmonium," 1923