From the Archive of my Youth

Strange and wonderful things are happening to me lately. It is as if there is a gnome inside my head who suddenly woke up and decided it was time to clear the place out. I feel like I can focus more, and be disciplined with my time without being inhumanely ambitious. 

I also feel a complete loss of mystique about being an artist. This is wonderful. I don’t feel like I have to be on the edge to be legit and I don’t feel like a pipe dreamer for wanting to make a living at it. It seems perfectly natural now that I should want my livelihood to come from the things that I do well and enjoy. Everyone should have that. I used to think it was a choice to be an artist, that I had romanticized it and was looking for fame and escape from responsibility more than a legitimate field of work. I do alright at my current jobs, but I don’t use up the entirety of my soul while I’m there.

Another lovely realization is how much I love to write and how much  I have to say. I think I finally sense how I can talk about issues that are important to me without feeling like I am being overly righteous or afraid of sharing too much personal information in the wrong place.

I have suddenly come to terms with my 20s, too. For the last few years I’ve really been struggling to accept the choices I made during that time. I seem to think I should have been developing worldly skills, advancing in a career, saving money, finding a mate (or at least having a constant string of amorous lovers.) After I made the commitment to go back to school and follow my passions I felt really disheartened that I had so little in the way of resources to get by with. Now, I look back at my 20s and see what an interesting and rich time it was. I was a nut! I spent my time hiking in the parks, painting enormous paintings in my tiny apartment, writing poems and reading at poetry open-mics, having occasional and ridiculous romances, waking up every morning to do yoga and meditate. What is so wrong with all that? Sure I was lonely and miserable a lot of the time, but I was always trying to find happiness and connection, what more could I ask of myself?

The paintings in this post are all ones I made in during my fateful 20s. They are mostly 3-4 feet wide and 3-5 feet long, tempera on banner paper. I like the idea of posting more of my old work to appreciate how I spent my time during that decade, to see it as the precursor to the work I'm doing now rather than a waste of time.

Autumn Light

The most difficult aspect of poetry for me is editing. Perhaps I have pared this down so much it no longer says what I intended it to. Perhaps it is too contrived. Maybe I should just say: I was walking home form the park and the light was so gentle on the dry grass it made the whole world seem soft. And there were apples nested perfectly in the straw, glowing like embers, like they just had the most amazing fling with the sun, who was now resigned to leave his wildness behind and settle down for the winter. That's not quite poetry. I mean, Raymond Carver can pull it off, but maybe I don't want to write poems anyway.

Also, I think the painting might be a little contrived. But its alright because I saw this beautiful thing and I put it on paper and later when I've done it hundreds of times it will all come out in my real voice and I will not have to think about things like art and poetry.

The Trees Rest

This painting is based loosely on a part of Gabriel Park in Multnomah Village. I am so sad that I cannot find the picture I took of the under-painting, it was a particularly good one. I posted one of my sketches instead. Something that fascinates me lately is that I really like to paint flat, meaning I don't create a lot of depth with shading, or muting colors in the background, amplifying details in the foreground. But what interests me most about landscape are the spaces that are created be trees and branches. I'm not sure if my flatness is something I need to overcome or if it might help me say what I need to about space if I just explored it more. I have no interest in painting realistic landscapes so there's really no reason not to explore the virtues of flatness for a while.

The Inklings of Autumn

Autumn is my favorite time of year. Someone told me once that the Celts believed that it is the time of year when the veil between the worlds is thinnest. Maybe it wasn't the Celts, but the description fit for me. I have to think that I am more at home in that other world because I feel more at home and homesick all at the same time during the fall. Most people I know have far away places they'd like to go for their dream vacations, I just want to save enough money to take the entire Autumn off, to go outside everyday and watch the minutest changes from summer to winter.

I'm not sure what I think of the poem illustration but I want to do more. One thing I've noticed about amateur artists is that we are often most satisfied with our work when it reminds us of something we've seen somewhere else. It's not conscious, it just resonates in a familiar place in our brain that we associate with good art. There's certainly nothing wrong with working within an established aesthetic, but there is also no reason to stave off our uniqueness just because we have no reference point for what we see. One of the most useful benefits of keeping a blog is that I can occasionally scroll through the archives. If I am brave about posting things I don't necessarily like I often find they inspire me later. Now I want to make use of that and keep working in this vein to see what develops from it.

The Crows Slip

Rough Draft #467

More Crows

When I look at a bunch of my watercolors together I feel like they should be a book but I can't quite imagine, yet what would tie them together. I experimented with taking a poem and trying to make it in the same style as my water colors. So far, no luck. The piece above feels right but I just can't figure out what black blobs say about crows settling in for the night.