in the muddle

Perhaps it’s a self portrait, and I am the cup — beset by indefinable and menacing-seeming massivities on either side.  Under me is a solid slab, but it’s probably cold — solid but cold.

Or maybe it’s your portrait.  Maybe it’s not me — I am a sunny optimist, after all.  So maybe I just drew it, and it’s your portrait.

At least it has abundant green, green like leafy forest over-hanging canopy.  And it has orange, warming deep and comforting.  And that emblematic slab — the tile coaster where the coffee mug sits — is blue ethereal.  And those un-identifiable massivities are night colored like a field of stars. The emblems, the symbolism are much to unravel.

Maybe it’s just a still life of a coffee mug.  But one cannot rule out the symbolic portrait.

Which is it?  You or me?

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Art of the Individual

All you have to ask yourself is: “What do human beings do?”  What characterizes the human story?  Compare us with the animals, and ask what are we particularly good at?  And here one asks not about the geniuses only, but about each ordinary person.  We are creators of ourselves and discoverers of ourselves too,  and molding this individual personality is the chief business of each person’s existence.  And too, it is a marvel how people project the sense of themselves upon others, how you can walk past a total stranger and merely nod the most summary of greetings and receive in return a distinct impression of this unknown other.  Sometimes quick impressions of this sort turn out to have been very revealing.

We ought to be teaching it in school, using every subject and every endeavor to get the message across, bending every discipline to the task – science, art, history, literature, music, having all these things as tools for creating the self, for becoming a person.

Hand Writing

I think the great Aussi poet Paul Squires read my mind.

More Fast Landscape: Water is a Mirror

Anything with water in it seems very psychologically suspicious to me!  Water is Nature’s great big mirror, and all landscapes with water strike me as sideways alllusions to Narcissus! 

Look into these waters and see the waves in my mind!  Cause I’m deep!

But, really.  Blue is such a rich, luxurious color.  We are all wealthy beyond our dreams on a day when we stand beneath a deep blue sky.  I make this series of landscapes in my apartment studio from photographs and imagination.  Sometimes the weather outside has been frigid and grey.  But indoors its 72 degrees, humid and mild beyond measure beside the river bank of my thoughts where many singing birds sound out their bright chorus.