The Bird and the Bees

The canary in the coal mine
When she stops singing
Lives are on the line
None more so than hers

I never thought I’d live to see music stop
And I know it never truly did
Wherever there are humans
There is music
And yet
It went oddly quiet for a time
Times and half a time
So quiet that the site and sound
Of a piano being played in the street
Held us in tears

How much could a canary cost
Back in the days when
Carbon monoxide sensors did not exist?
It could not have been much
And yet some engineer with a heart
Built a box with the sole purpose
Of reviving unconscious canaries
In an act of rather clever love
Because the cost of a life
Is never proportional to its worth

Keep singing, songbird

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Internal Communications

There is a stage every painting I create goes through at the very beginning that I fall in love with almost every time. It’s not the polished end-game, it’s the initial quick sketch with the first few thin washes of color applied. There is something about that first reaction to the scene before me that happens almost by itself. It is purely joyful to me. After that stage I usually begin the arduous stage of building, building, building layer upon layer of heavier and heavier paint, just pushing, pushing until the painting finally looks like “my work” whatever the hell that is supposed to be… all I know is that it nearly sucks the life out of everything. Oh, I like the finished results in the end, but the whole thing is a just chore to get to that place. The painting becomes only about the end result and the process become mechanical, and contains very little mystery to me after that initial sketch stage.

For the last several years I’ve been grinding against this process, pushing painting after painting through the corridors of strained conformity to an expected standard of completion.

Until this one.

At Wine by the Sea this year I arrived fresh off a bender of live painting all weekend at the Redwood Coast Music Festival, sneaking in a quick break from painting there to come out to this wonderful event and… paint some more. With more live music! I am seriously the most spoiled artist in the world sometimes. After my initial sketch was laid out (with all the joy I previously mentioned) I went on a beer run (about 12 steps from my easel) and when I returned I saw the sketch just sitting there in its joyful glory, not asking for anything of me. This is awkward. I tried to tell it that I was at an event, this was a fundraiser, and I was expected to deliver something more, but this fun little sketch was a stubborn bugger, just sitting there all beautiful and in need of nothing. Reminded me of my wife. I realize this is not an argument I can win. In fact it’s probably not one I should even be having.

So I step away and discuss the matter with some lovely guests of the event, who showed themselves loyal friends and took my side in the matter, and yet… there she was, smiling in the misty breeze, entirely sure of herself. Dang. How can she do this to me? As I continued mulling over my problems to friends and strangers alike, something unusual happened. I heard myself. And upon hearing myself deliberating whether to push this painting that I love into becoming something it isn’t (for many great reasons, mind you), I couldn’t help but to see the obvious. There isn’t an artist in the world that I would advise continuing to push their work past it’s joyful place for the sake of living up to some external standard- real or imagined. No way.

You must listen to your work.
(and your wife)
And honor them both.

So that is what I chose.

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Ella’s Point

This was pure imagination, but not all my own. My wife and I had been tasked to give some art instruction to a friend’s daughter as part of an independent study art class she was in at her local high school. You have to know one thing- I am not a very good teacher.

I had to wrack my brain to come up with teacherly things to have her work on, one of which was to come up with a painting with a clearly defined foreground, midground, and background. I’ve heard other artists talk about this and thought it sounded pretty legit. So she comes in with a simple sketch of a grassy foreground meadow with a dirt path and post-and-rail fence, a midground of a sloping headland, and a background of another distant sloping headland.

All I could think was how these points would be firing on the right swell. Long lefts forever! So being the not-so-great teacher that I was, I got all excited and had her watch while I painted and talked my way through my own version of her concept. I guess I straight up stole it? Depends on how you look at it I suppose. I could have been a good teacher and had her paint alongside me, but I kinda just wanted to paint the thing myself.

I hope she wasn’t bored off her mind, a solid hour of her and my wife sitting there chatting about the painting and asking questions while I painted and sorted out various academic solutions to achieving “atmospheric perspective” and such art teachery sounding things. Like a bad Bob Ross episode, only longer without the edits. But as with much of my art, I was mostly just daydreaming about the waves I wanted to see lining up down these points.

We finished up, I was stoked, everyone was relieved it was over, and the next week she came back to paint her own version. I really can’t say if watching me had helped her much or not.

Art is funny like that. I’ve mostly noticed artists just do what they do, how they do it, and while it’s interesting to see how others approach similar subjects, none of us really care all that much once we have a brush in our hand.

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Afternoon Commitments

When we’re young and in love, we can ignore all the demands of the world in favor of one afternoon alone with our loved one, while the entire world becomes small enough to rest in the shade of a single beach umbrella. 
 
If you know my art, you know I’m usually drawn to higher ground with sweeping views of an entire coastline, often stretching for miles into eternity, or the horizon, whichever comes first. 
 
So a quiet, intimate, beach level moment where love unfolds in a single cove of sand nestled between the sculpted forms of sandstone cliffs and calm and playful sea, well, it’s a bit different for me.  
 
It’s a fairly simple painting, and it was the simplicity itself that was the challenge.  
 
But for my friend who proposed to his wife here at this spot, this isn’t just a simple scene. For him, in that moment, the whole world came to rest under the shade of that umbrella. 

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Dust and Ashes

The poppies and buckwheat bloom
Little fires that have jumped the hearth
Right out from the sun itself
Scattering our world alight
Illuminating our path

And the dust we kick up
Reminds us where we come from
As it settles on our skin
A mourning dew
Of leftover ash
Reminding us of where we’ll go

Only in the presence of fire
Do we truly see one another

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Depth Perception #5

There is something primordial about staring into the blackness of the deep. A sense of heightened awareness is stirred because, well, mostly because monsters. So we feel safer in shallow waters where we can see with all certainty that no such monsters lurk. And yet if the ocean is really moving its the shallows with thier unmoving rocks that become dangerous and the safety of deep water is what we strive for. In either case, clear water is helpful.

So it also is in the ocean of our minds. There’s times we need to go deep, and times to rest in the shallows. It depends on the turbulence we face. And just like the ocean, a little clarity is always helpful.

This series is a prayer for clarity for us all.

I think.

It gets murky sometimes.

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Depth Perception #4

Our bodies are made of rocks, sand, and clay. Veins of metal pulse beneath. Mining operations are blood transfusions that keep the gods on life support. Our spirits disturbed, distant storms, fueled by the heat of life-giving fire, translates the language that created the first world into the depths of our subconsciousness, reverberating in pulses of groundswell that interact with these earthen bodies and take on surprising forms, a rhythm of highs and lows, at turns chaos, at turns sublimely beautiful.

And when the storm is distant? And when the local rainfall subsides, and our bodies are no longer awash with spiritual grief of the present moment? When those creeks slow to a trickle and run clear to the sea? And when those subconscious depths relax for a season, and the murky sediments drop to the seabed and find rest?

That is when we know clarity. That is when we can stand centered in our bodies, and look through our spirit, and into the depth of our subconscious life, and see the strange and beautiful creatures that swim the depths there.

When conditions align just so, and a distant storm unseen sends its forerunners into the crystal clear coves and bays, we can see the dance in whole new ways. We can see the stars in the bright blue sky, and we can see reefs beneath the waves, and we can see the groundswells approach with a clarity unmatched.

That is when we stand there in the shallows, observing the interplay of life upon our bodies, hypnotized by the beauty within us, and next thing you know, we’re smashed into the rocks, gulping for air, our swim trunks blown right off in the explosion and we wash ashore awkwardly, sometimes bleeding, naked, and laughing.

Life is beautiful. Carry on.

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