We Do Get Weary

Souls Get Tried, Hearts Broken

I heard from a friend recently, for the first time in years.

His story got worse as it unfolded. A list of sorrows and loss.

Over the years he went from one bad job to another. Small-town economy is like that of the big city. Diminishing returns. Leaving the field you worked in just to have a job. To having no job.

Then cancer in the family. Med expenses. Recovery! But the illness took it's toll. Separation.

The death of the family pet was a final blow.

The life-blood of this friend has always been music. His Facebook photos are of band mates all the way back to junior high. He's in a band now. He contacted me to see if I could help with a band logo. And he told me his story.

A part of art's job should be to tell the story of the artist's times. Goya and the horror of invasion; Hopper and the isolation of the city; Picasso and the bombing of a Spanish town.

As I worked on the band's logo, I kept replaying his pathetic story, like the worst country song I'd ever heard. Couldn't help being touched by it. He summed it up: Living in his brother's empty house, a for-sale sign on the lawn. Time running out.

The times are rough.

I live in a middle-class neighborhood. As I walk the dog I note all the front porches with the rocking chairs and little tables and potted plants. They are set designs from a world that doesn't exist any more. People no longer sit on their porches. They sit inside, behind drawn window shades. Worrying.

The only people on the street are those walking their dogs.

I decided to do a little "report" from my era. I surfed the internet for various images and put them together, artified them, in the electronic collage above -- "When Times Get Rough".

Music is keeping my friend alive and hopeful.

He liked the logo.

Futurists of the Past

Coming Around and Going Around

Visiting with a friend brought to mind a painting I did ten or more years ago.

Marcel Duchamp's painting "Nude Descending a Staircase" has long been an icon defining "modern art". Just as many who don't know much about art know about Vincent Vangogh's ill-fated ear, the nude descending that staircase comes to mind for many who couldn't name another "Modern" painting or sculpture.

I've long thought it funny that art still called modern was being done well over 100 years ago.

We live in a disposable age of everything being so 15 minutes ago, so last wednesday, and yet, work by Monet and his buds were being painted and rejected in the 1880s.

Just to give a little background to that stair-descending nude, Duchamp painted it in 1912 and entered it in that year's established outsider artists' big show. By that time being an outsider was gaining some cachet with those salon-going Parisians who loved being shocked.

The Impressionists had done it in the previous generation and the Cubists were taking up le shock treatment for les Parisiennes.

Duchamp had lettered the title of the painting at the bottom left of the canvas and was asked to change the title or take the painting home. Who knows why? Paris was used to nudes, maybe they weren't used to titles.

It's also said that the Cubists had some objection or other to the painting. Duchamp objected to the request and took his painting home. He then entered the same painting in the big "Armory Show" of 1913, which introduced all this modern stuff to America. The "Nude" raised a bunch of sand there, too.

Duchamp eventually tired of people being shocked by pigment on canvas and retired to playing chess for the rest of his life.

During the period that I painted my descending art (that painting at the top, "Dude Descending a Staircase"), I was showing my work in a sweetly funky gallery called Pelican Place. A bare brick wall beyond the parking lot was regularly used by FSU art students to do graffiti wall art. I liked their work and thought about the fuss graffiti was making in cities around the world.

Graffiti art also makes it more interesting to be stopped at a railroad crossing by a passing train. Each freight car is part of a moving exhibit.

I also had scuffed up elbows and knees during a brief fling with boarding, and related to the spirit of street art.

And beyond all that, I can't resist a good pun. So I brought together the elan of 100-year-old outsider art with the decade-old outside-wall art in that modest little painting I did.

And it sold.

My apologies to Marcel Duchamp. It wasn't outside enough to be rejected, as his was.

But I think Marcel would have liked the joke.

How Many Chances Do We Get?

Blessings or Curses?

This painting was done in 1994. Sixteen years seems like a long time ago.

A much younger man than I am now did this painting. And that younger man was troubled and pressured by circumstance to weigh the truths of life. Feeling the need to resolve unanswerables.

Some in my life had made choices of faith that I couldn't. It put a space between us.

We remain friends thanks to their generosity and I never did make a choice. Couldn't. Can't.

After all this time we still come back to those points of discussion. There is less heat and fire to the discussions now and we agree to disagree. We all know where we stand. What we do now is exchange honesty and sincerity.

After all this time of examining what I do and don't believe about the whole shebang of the universe, I come down to a few simple guideposts, none of which can be traced to any particular doctrine.

Those points involve individuals or groups who are in difficulty like that guy up there is.

The one in "Last Match".

He's lost in the woods, in the dark, and down to his last match.

My guiding points are to try to avoid getting lost in the woods. Avoid getting down to that last match. And I try not to be so alone that these things happen in the first place.

I'm a loner by nature, but I'm not foolish. Good friends will get you through this life.

I've often wanted to drift from those friends over the sixteen years of discussion and argument, but we're still together, most of us. The irony is that I'm still here discussing and arguing with them while some of their group have strayed off, alone, into the woods.

But above the belief in friendship I try to adhere to, is the desire to pay that friendship forward. I don't do that well. I'm a pretty clumsy friend. But I try.

The people in Haiti have just gotten shoved into the deep woods. They long ago ran out of matches. There are a lot of friendly people trying to get to them and we know they won't find all the lost folks. I'm overworking this metaphor, but bear with me.

We all know the parables. We were all taught to be good do-bees, that a friend in need is a friend indeed.

And it gets real old, this helping others. It's a slog. Specially when the same people seem to need help again and again. But, honestly, in spite of all the cynicism, what else is there to do?

Change the channel to American Idol?

All this week an old song by the '60s rock group Rare Bird has been running through my head.

The song's title is "Sympathy" and the punchline is "And sympathy is what we need, my friend, because there's not enough love to go around."

We can scream and yell about whose fault it is that help is needed. Or we can help.

Someone else's curse can be a blessing of sorts. It shows us to be better off than that person. And it gives us a chance to reach out beyond our safety zones.

And in a lifetime we get plenty of chances to be both blessed and cursed.

A Bagette and Some Red Wine

Just a Hint of French

We spent the Christmas holiday on Cedar Key, where homes are built on the second floor. The first floor is left empty to minimize damage if and when tides come rushing in at the front of a hurricane.

There was no storm during our stay. Just a few days of blessed peace and quiet, and some retired snowbirds taking their winter residence far from Ontario, Quebec and other cold, dark places.

Speaking to such neighbors put me in a Frenchie sort of mood when I saw the woman above from "our" second-story porch. "Madame et la Petite" (A Ladie and the Little One).

All that was missing was the panier, the bread basket, on her bike. That would set the stage for a trip to town and the purchase of groceries for the evening meal. Something flavorful.

The dog would poke along, sniffing at all the usual spots and marking as many as time and fluid would allow, then run to catch up with Madame.

In town, Madame would select some choice cuts of meat and eye the butcher's thumb as he weighed them. That bagette, a bottle of wine and some fresh-cut flowers would round out the purchase.

The trip home would involve the usual sharp calls to the dog, who would chase the same cat, bark back at that same big spotted hound, and wander down the same trail she always does.

Madame might even use some of those rougher French phrases that slip out when la petite isn't as charming as she is at home.

Back at home, the evening meal would be prepared. The small house would fill with the aroma of things to come. The dog would curl up in the pool of fading sunlight at the base of the storm door. The wine would be airing out on the table by the new flowers in the vase.

The winter sun would set beyond the bayou across the street.

But, of course, that didn't happen. It was just a neighbor taking an afternoon ride.

Art is the spice that adds flavor to an ordinary meal.

A Little Color

Goes a Long Way

This entry is filed under Mattie Walks.

The girl does get bored with the same left-or-right decision to our walks on our one-street neighborhood. I try other sites to break up the daily grind. She likes the cemetery. I like the lake.

That's a view of the lake above. "Fall, Lake Hall". The lake is part of Maclay Gardens State Park, a former estate of wealthy New York snowbirds who wintered in Tallahassee while most grandees chose to roost on Jekyll Island off the coast of Georgia. The estate was ceded to Florida and attracts many visitors during the camellia and azalea seasons. Locals enjoy the park all year around.

Mattie doesn't care as much for it as I do. The trails creep her out a bit. I think she's a suburban girl at heart. Then again, she may be getting scent of a bear or other threatening critter. What do I know?

Lake hall winds around, creating little coves here and there, and the shore is heavily wooded with the region's collection of pines, oaks, sweetgum and magnolia trees. A nice place to be during every season.

And the truth is that the scene above was one of a pretty hot summer. Everything about it is true to the moment except the color of the leaves indicating temperature and season.

The problem I have in seeing so many enticing moments and events in the nature of my environment is ... that those moments stack up. Getting to a painting in its time is difficult. So many impressions amass on the sketch pile that it's often winter before I finish summer paintings, spring before the fall art gets easel time, and so forth.

A counter-pressure comes from galleries asking for works denoting a current season. It's understandable, of course. Patrons are as susceptible to the seasons as I am.

I hadn't yet gotten to this Lake Hall painting and wanted to do it, so what the heck -- it became a fall painting. And the stripe of wind-whipped ripples on the water (which were there in summer) add a touch of chill to the air.

The original moment indicated a cooling breeze.

I'll catch up with other summer lake views soon because the temperature and the leaves are falling.

Somewhat Wild

But Not Really

These posts are exercises in free association, spurred by one image as a starting point.

I've described the wild acres beyond our back yard in previous posts. Since there is no fence, it's sometimes hard to tell where the free will of nature ends and the struggle to impose our will on nature begins.

We get a lot of free-booter wild plants spreading throughout the back in the spring. I dubbed one variety I like very much as it blooms a wild Iris. The more I saw real Irises, the more I came to think this was not one. But I kept playing with that name -- Irish Rose, Iris Rose, Wild Iris Rose.

"Wild Iris Rose" ... free association and imagery began to form a young lady, well, perhaps not a "lady", but young, Irish and a little wild. I played with that theme for quite a while, but couldn't put Iris in the picture.

In the meantime, I thought Van Gogh's portraiture -- all line and color, "modernist" and rebellious while gorgeous in color -- and of course his iris paintings.

I kept coming back to that idea, over the months, each time I saw one of the faux-irises in the yard. But I still had no model for that moody lass.

Finally, as I was thumbing through Daughter's recent post of photos, there was Iris!

I am a shameless thief of Daughter's stuff, though I do work at it to make it my own.

I combined Van Gogh's Irises, a makeover of Daughter into a redhead (and a few other changes here and there), an industrial brick wall for a background, and there you have it: "Wild Iris Rose".

These things don't come for free, though.

As I looked over Vincent Van Gogh's output of work again for this painting, I had to admit to myself that it was his story that appeals as much or more than his art.

The poor, angst-ridden man who cut off his ear (actually, a lobe). Everyone "knows" that story.

Combine the story of struggle, illness, the exhilaration of revolution (Impressionism and Post-Impressionism), stir in elements of political correctness and it becomes very hard to say "But he doesn't draw very well. His color is brilliant, but many of his compositions are just plain clumsy."

Maybe it's aging. Maybe I'm becoming the crabby old fart who says things for effect.

Or maybe, at this late age, I'm beginning to admit to myself what I really think.

Going with the Flow

Boy, Hot Enough for You?!

Took a little road trip Out West to see Daughter a while back. Got on I-10 and headed west.

If you go far enough west, you can see remnants of the old Route 66. Sometimes it's on your left, other times on the right. Just over there.

A little sign of life clings to some of those strips of pavement. I recreated the scene above, "Oasis", from memory, of a restaurant out there on a stretch of old 66.

I was moving along that I-10 flow. There wasn't time to stop, so this is pretty much a whole-cloth image, capturing the feel of the moment and not necessarily the details.

There's something about traveling at 70+ mph for hours or even days that makes it hard to stop.

That momentum builds up and takes over the trip.

Now, when I look at that painting, I think of another trip taken even earlier with Daughter's grandfather. Gramps needed to go to California and I went along.

We put all our stuff in his Chevy El Camino and headed west from Tallahassee. Then stopped in Quincy (19 miles west of our starting point). A radiator hose was unclipped and got burned by engine heat. Ka-ching.

Hose fixed, we started west again.

We stopped for different engine or radiator problems two more times (ka-ching, ka-ching) and switched over to Highway 40 in Arizona. We finally got to Needles, on the eastern edge of California, crossing the Colorado River. Last water until the Pacific Ocean.

In between the Colorado and the Pacific lay the Mojave desert and the San Bernadino Mountains.

That radiator started acting up again when we attempted the rise outside Needles. The El Camino just couldn't make it to the top without the radiator boiling over.

I could spend a lot of time on this part of the story, but I won't.

Let's just say we decided to fill up on water and move out into the desert. And overheat. And stop. The engine and radiator would cool and we'd add water. Then get on the road again.

After 20-30 miles the engine would overhear again. Re-read the paragraph above.

We crossed the Mojave that way, 30 miles at a time. We went without a.c. to stretch the mileage.

At about the halfway point, we pulled into a chain/family sort of restaurant. Some entrepreneur always stakes out these halfway points. Think of the drive the staff has to make. The parking lot was full.

We got a booth and I noticed most patrons seemed red-faced, flush. And tired. The kids were lying on the booth benches. Neither Mom nor Dad nagged them to sit up straight. Waitresses kept the water coming.

We cooled it as long as we could, then climbed back in the saddle and moved out again.

That crossing lasted all day and we climbed the mountains in the setting sun. The car was able to go longer and longer without overheating. Then we headed downhill and on to our destination, Pomona. Glorious Pomona.

What a trip! We didn't die. Memories are made of this.