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Between every two pines is a doorway to a new world.

- John Muir

Happy is the house that shelters a friend.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

My love affair with the The Sartorialist is over. I deleted photographer Scott Schuman’s blog from my blogroll for posting too many glamorized pictures of cigarettes being smoked and for aggressively moderating anti-smoking comments out of his conversation while allowing pro-”ciggy” voices to hold sway.

There are good arguments both for and against the use of destructive imagery in art (yes, I think glamorized images of smoking are destructive). John H. Richardson’s personal take in, “My History of Violence,” is great and though his focus is on violence his arguments apply to all images that depict self-harm or the harm of others. An excerpt:

When I was a cub reporter starting out at the Albuquerque Tribune, I found a report in the police blotter about a pair of 16-year-old lovers who gassed themselves in a car. I about choked on how great a story it was, did a little reporting, found out they did it in a closed garage and that their bodies were discovered by the very same parents who were trying to split them up. Then I pitched it to my editor. no way, he said. I said, “What? Are you crazy? It’s Romeo and fucking Juliet!” He gave me a sad look. “If I run this story, and give it big play and a nice layout, I guarantee you there will be a copycat suicide. Maybe a bunch of them. Do you want that on your conscience?”

I said, it’s not my responsibility what crazy people do. It’s the truth and that’s what I want to write, the truth. Would you tell Shakespeare to stick to comedies? Would you tell Tolstoy to write Peace and Peace?
…

Somehow, my editor managed to resist my blinding rhetorical onslaught. He didn’t run the piece. And I thought, this little burg is just too small-town for me, baby. These people don’t understand art. They don’t understand transgression. So I went to Hollywood. And just after I got there, some guy made a movie called The Program that had a scene where some kids lay down on a highway divider as a dare—and sure enough, there were copycats out in Pennsylvania who laid their dumb asses down on highway dividers and got squashed. And the studio said, hey, it’s not our responsibility what crazy people do. These people just don’t understand art…”

You can read the whole article on Paste.

“Space, and space again, is the infinite deity which surrounds us and in which we are ourselves contained.”

- Max Beckmann

I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.

- John Adams, 1780

The first time I read the above quote it charmed me. We know our founding fathers and mothers to be starchy advocates of industry and piety, not the arts. So the reference to painting, poetry and music as something children ought to have a right to study… well, I love it. But having just watched the HBO mini-series John Adams I’m seeing the quote differently. Actor Paul Giamatti delivered the line with a contemptuous edge, sitting at table in France during the American Revolution surrounded by sensual excess. Though I prefer my earnest reading of Adams’ words, I appreciate the complexity lent by Giamiatti, who played Adams as a smart and principled but neurotic man who was hard on his children. A deeply humanizing portrait that I loved.

Happy Independence Day, 2009.

“John Adams 1823–24″ by Gilbert Stuart, oil on canvas 30″ x 25″

Color provokes a psychic vibration. Color hides a power still unknown but real, which acts on every part of the human body.

- Wassily Kandinsky

“It’s spring fever… when you’ve got it, you want – oh, you don’t quite know what it is you do want – but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!”

- Mark Twain

Archway from the Darb-i Imam shrine, Isfahan, Iran.

As a passionate observer of nature’s patterns (plant symmetry, honeycomb, etc…) and a long time migraine sufferer I found this article by Oliver Sacks fascinating. It hints at the idea that there’s some kind of universal/chemical truth underlying all instances of geometric pattern and it has something to do with how we’re physically made.

A choice quote:

“There is an increasing feeling among neuroscientists that self-organizing activity in vast populations of visual neurons is a prerequisite of visual perception — that this is how seeing begins. Spontaneous self-organization is not restricted to living systems — one may see it equally in the formation of snow crystals, in the roilings and eddies of turbulent water, in certain oscillating chemical reactions. Here, too, self-organization can produce geometries and patterns in space and time, very similar to what one may see in a migraine aura. In this sense, the geometrical hallucinations of migraine allow us to experience in ourselves not only a universal of neural functioning, but a universal of nature itself.”

Poets, Painters, Puddings

Poets, painters, and puddings; these three
Make up the World as it ought to be.

Poets make faces
And sudden grimaces:
They twit you, and spit you
On words: then admit you
To heaven or hell
By the tales that they tell.

Painters are gay
As young rabbits in May:
They buy jolly mugs,
Bowls, pictures, and jugs:
The things round their necks
Are lively with checks,
(For they like something red
As a frame for the head):
Or they’ll curse you with oaths,
That tear holes in your clothes.
(With nothing to mend them
You’d best not offend them.)

Puddings should be
Full of currants, for me:
Boiled in a pail,
Tied in the tail
Of an old bleached shirt:
So hot that they hurt,
So huge that they last
From the dim, distant past
Until the crack o’ doom
Lift the roof off the room.

Poets, painters, and puddings; these three
Crown the day as it crowned should be.

- Richard Hughes

Wafer, encaustic and ink on panel, 5″ x 4″

They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it?

- Jeanette Winterson

Thank you to everyone who took the time to read my blog, or take in my paintings, or see Sister Bee in 2008. You inspire me! I look forward to posting more after Christmas. ‘Til then may warmth and wonderment be yours.

Eldest Daughter, encaustic and ink on panel, 5″ x 4″

If winter is slumber and spring is birth, and summer is life, then autumn rounds out to be reflection. It’s a time of year when the leaves are down and the harvest is in and the perennials are gone. Mother Earth just closed up the drapes on another year and it’s time to reflect on what’s come before.

Mitchell Burgess, Northern Exposure, Thanksgiving, 1992

To the bee, a flower is a fountain of life, and to the flower, a bee is a messenger of love.

- Kahlil Gibran

From a carefully written overview of collapse disorder at physorg.com.

Hither, encaustic and ink on panel, 10″ x 8″

Filmmaker, Michael Moore, has written some interesting things about what an Obama administration might mean for artists. Here’s a tasty bit from his longer message…

We may, just possibly… see a time of refreshing openness, enlightenment and creativity. The arts and the artists will not be seen as the enemy. Perhaps art will be explored in order to discover the greater truths. When FDR was ushered in with his landslide in 1932, what followed was Frank Capra and Preston Sturgis, Woody Guthrie and John Steinbeck, Dorothea Lange and Orson Welles. All week long I have been inundated with media asking me, “gee, Mike, what will you do now that Bush is gone?” Are they kidding? What will it be like to work and create in an environment that nurtures and supports film and the arts, science and invention, and the freedom to be whatever you want to be? Watch a thousand flowers bloom! We’ve entered a new era, and if I could sum up our collective first thought of this new era, it is this: Anything Is Possible.

Let the flowers unfold!

Thanks to my friend Laurel Kallenbach (who viewed the election results with a bunch of scientists from NOAA) for the heads up.

Attended a dinner a mile below the tower in 2nd Street to celebrate the raising of the roof of an African Church. About 100 white persons, chiefly carpenters, dined at one table, who were waited upon by Africans. Afterward about 50 black people sat down at the same table, who were waited upon by white people. Never did I see people more happy. Some of them shed tears of joy. A old black man took Mr. Nicholson by the hand and said to him, “May you live long, and when you die, may you not die eternally.” I gave them two toasts, viz: “Peace on earth and good will to man,” and, “May African Churches everywhere soon succeed African bondage.” The last was received with three cheers.

- Benjamin Rush, August 22, 1793

Here’s a pumpkin drawing I made in Pencil I at the Denver Botanic Gardens. (They’ve got an amazingly good botanical illustration program.) It’s satisfying to draw realistically from life. There’s something about it that feels magical. But this drawing doesn’t qualify as art to me. I need transformation. When a recognizable form shifts & becomes something new… that’s art.