Look At Us Now

SnowFlowers

The song is a resignation. It started as a consequence of me talking to my mom and remembering my Dad who passed a long time ago. For me, it’s the story of where we have gone since that time as a country and as a people. It’s a darker, meaner time than it was then.

The first line came to me (Hollowness is bending down like rain on a line), and I wasn’t sure what it meant, but I remembered the clothes line in our back yard: the white sheets, the pins my mom pulled from her mouth to hold the sheets against the wind; simplicity and beauty and love and work.

One of the last lines of the song that bookends the sort of trajectory of time (Memories a vacuum like pins on a line), is an acknowledgment that time passes and the sheets that crisply held the sunshine and smelled like summer are gone, a memory almost lost.

30”x22” paint, plaster, glue, pencil, pastel on Arches

River of Sound

It feels to me like the most enduring theme of our specific time in history is the threat of life ending by our hands. Understanding our role in this prospect is disconcerting to say the least. Finding meaning, bearing witness, even knowing how to be is a struggle. And yet, all the while we’re being drawn inevitably to some other less fearful time . Some idyll, I’d call it. And there is also love. This song is about that.

Brown Butterflies 30”x 22” mixed media and collage on Arches.

It’s interesting, after a lifetime of picture making, it’s become necessary for me to answer the fundamental question, “Why do it at all?” I’m beginning to understand it’s simply about expressing some emotion(s) using visual language that escapes the limitations of spoken translation. If this picture, for example, could be explained using language then I’d have to conclude, “Why bother?” So for me, I suspect, is a kind of need to feel these untranslatable emotions - both by making the pictures and by looking at what I’ve made.

White Butterflies 30”x 22” mixed media and collage on Arches.

After creating so many pictures digitally, I find that when I am in my studio, the materiality of the process is really exciting. What I’m after in making these pictures is expressing emotion and I find that the more I let the materials dictate the process the happier and more surprised I am by the outcome.

Spending Always

Somebody, probably a lot of somebodies, said that you write to find out what you’re thinking. I wrote this song called, Spending Always, as a waySpending Always to find out what I was thinking about this election, and more generally this country. I would have thought it would have turned out to be something grand and anthemic. But it turneSpending Alwayd out, instead, to be more elegiac in a minor key and personal: A love story about living through it - whatever comes - together. See the lyrics on the poems page; Spending Always.

October / I Stay

I have been anticipating the new Cure album for a looong time - as have a lot of fans - for many years now. The thing that makes Robert Smith’s new record so wonderful, is how he makes his music personal and universal by packing it with emotion. In this fantastic interview at Abbey Road Studios he talks at length about his Cure life.

Robert Smith interview.

In this love song to my wife, I’ve tried to use that example to create an emotional connection rendered as a kind of waking dream - which often - I think it is.

Wonderful Wilson

Wonderful Wilson has been gone from our lives for a summer now, but these beautiful roses above his grave remind us everyday that he is with us still. The flowers are right outside our front door, so I get to visit him everyday. It’s a comfort.

California

I love the song Pacific Coast Highway by Burt Bacharach. I wanted to try to write something as wonderfully breezy as a reminiscence of my time living in the Golden State. In hindsight, my feelings about my California Dreams are more complex, so my song, it turns out, is more wistful than breezy.

But I’ll always love California.

Restaurant

My friend, Tom, sent me a great piano track from his friend, Steve Cooper (click to check out his audio production website), and I immediately thought this should be a song sung in a restaurant by a guy down in his cups feeling deeply personal regret, remorse - while the restaurant continues on serving customers completely disregarding the singer and his confession.

New Paintings

This oil painting is 40” x 80” - much more manageable than my last couple of big ones. I continued to use butterflies and water and fish as imagery to enjoy creating paintings that strive to engage, in a plastic way, the contrapuntal rhythms we observe in nature: I keep coming back to this imagery so it has, I assume, some deep subconscious meaning for me. It’s my way, in part, of understanding and finding a link to extend the concept and execution of the great Pollock paintings - Autumn Rhythm, for example. While I was painting this, I decided to work in a few additional sketches that would compliment this big painting. Instead, what I found, inadvertently, was a way to incorporate some additional visual vocabulary by adding in the sketches to create a collage process - which was very exciting for me.

Turquoise Butterflies, Yellow. Oil on Canvas. 40” x 80”

White Butterflies. Oil, pencil, pastel, crayon on Arches. 221/2" x 30”

I love the paintings by Tapies and especially his direct use of materials. He uses very specific materials that are part of his vocabulary, and he allows the materials to direct his painting action. This is a painting done on Arches paper. For this painting I experimented with a new ground that gave my marks more of a gritty tooth. I liked it. I embedded the collaged butterflies into the ground so it established a seamless surface to create this picture.

New Digital Drawings

So, my wife, Kris, and I just returned from a beautiful inspiring trip to the Cape, and came home to our Wonderful Wilson terribly sick. We lost Wilson just a few days later. An excruciatingly savage blow to us: The beauty and brutality of life - hand in hand.

I wrote this song for Wilson, for his example. Live in peace. Be content. Expect love.

We love you, Wilson. Thank you, my dear loving boy: I’m gonna miss you more than you could imagine!

Of course, at this stage of my life, time begins to take on a whole new character. I think losing Wilson, and recognizing that, as Lennon said, life is what happens while you’re making other plans, led to this song. A song about accepting the banality of daily life as our horizons change, all the while growing keener to the rhythms of nature.

Peace is the Answer (Song for Wilson)

Never has the mysterious process of creation been more unsettling for me than the making of these two paintings. Creativity, I think, has a very specific connection to a very specific moment in time and of our experience of life in full. Somewhere in the collision, the process reveals itself - grudgingly - as, for me, a song or picture or a poem. Intention goes by the wayside; a satisfactory resolution remains elusive until the mystery is content that its intentions are satisfied - this time…

These pictures turned out to be the visual expression of a song I wrote a while back called, What Shall We Do? The Rhythms of Nature. The fish pool in straight streams below the swirling water. The butterflies flutter along above .

So, while really challenging, and at times disheartening, the process forced me to be more imaginative, more brutal, more persistent. Ultimately, as both Phillip Guston and Robert Rauschenberg have said, we make pictures that we want to see. But I might say, in addition, we make pictures that we need to see ourselves in. Wait, Robert Motherwell already said that… oh well.