Recent Poetry and Paintings

3/24/11

Dreams are too tiring

To live two lives

One must die

Only to be reborn

Day and night

There is no rest

For the dreamer

Awakening

Disdain, love and fear

Blinking eyes

3/24/11

I first saw you sitting in the Square at the newsstand by the pit. Your blue eyes pierced through the gentle darkness of evening like two parallel flashlights. You studied my expression, still and quiet in your haste. How tall and tentative was your stature when you rose up, nervous and wavering like a wind-blown birch? Now nothing but an icon remains. Never will there be one so remote, strange and detached like a dimming star alone on the cusp of night’s shade. Soon, between the broad strokes of morning’s light will anyone stand to recall your shape?

3/24/11

I wanted to get closer to the wood of the table. To see more its dainty strokes, signs of life and feel a belonging and sameness. I leaned in to get a finer look, expecting to be transported down to the feathery grains and melt into them and my vision blurred. For the first time I fully experienced the truth; my eyes are but lenses. There was a limit to the distance between us before I could no longer see. It is real. There is no way to become one with another. When that fragile moment to merge arises falsity and confusion reign free. 

Scapes Show Month of April

I am showing these three paintings in a group show at Thos. Moser at 19 Arlington Street in Boston, MA during the month of April. The opening is Thursday, April 7th from 5:30-7:00pm.

New Self Portrait/Landscape

I've been playing with the idea of merging a self portrait with a landscape. Here is a new painting that I just started.

Sunday night:

So Monday night happened...things got kind of morbid but that is normal.

Tuesday night:

Dragon Princess with Phil

Phil and I are back at it again. This collaboration has been really amazing for both of us. It is rare to find such chemistry between two artists and we are learning a lot from our differences. We have also been drawing portraits of each other which has been a great learning experience.

This next series of three paintings has a theme. We took the three main images from one of my favorite pieces of prose from Rainer Maria Rilke's letters. The text can be found in Letters to A Young Poet. Phil is now a converted Rilke fan after reading the book!

Below you will find the text corresponding to the three images which are: The Man Dizzy on the Mountain, The Person Who Stays in the Corner of Their Room, and The Dragon Princess.

To speak of solitude again, it becomes always clearer that this is at bottom not something that one can take or leave. We are solitary. We may delude ourselves and act as though this were not so. That is all. But how much better it is to realize that we are so, yes even to begin by assuming it. We shall indeed turn dizzy then; for all points upon which our eye has been accustomed to rest are taken from us, there is nothing near any more and everything far is infinitely far. A person removed from his own room, almost without preparation and transition, and set upon the height of a great mountain range, would feel something of the sort: an unparalleled insecurity, an abandonment to something inexpressible would almost annihilate him. He would think himself falling or hurled out into space, or exploded into a thousand pieces: what a monstrous lie his brain would have to invent to catch up with and explain the state of his senses!

So for him who becomes solitary all distances, all measures change; of these changes many take place suddenly, and then, as with the man on the mountaintop, extraordinary imaginings and singular sensations arise that seem to grow out beyond all bearing, But it is necessary for us to experience that too. We must assume our existence as broadly as we in any way we can; everything, even the unheard-of, must be possible in it. That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular, and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. That mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm; the experiences that are called "visions," the whole so-called "spirit-world", death, all those things that are so closely akin to us, have by daily parrying been so crowded out of life that the sense with which we could have grasped them are atrophied. To say nothing of God.

But fear of the inexplicable has not alone impoverished the existence of the individual; the relationship between one human being and another has also been cramped by it, as though it had been lifted out of the riverbed of endless possibilities and set down in a fallow spot on the bank, to which nothing happens. For it is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed; it is shyness before any sort of new, unforseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope. But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation to another as something alive and will himself draw exhaustively from his own existence. For if we think of this existence of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it appears evident that most people learn to know only a corner of their room, a place by the window, a strip of floor on which they walk up and down. Thus they have a certain security. And yet that dangerous insecurity is so much more human which drives the prisoners in Poe's stories to feel out the shapes of their horrible dungeons and not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of the abode.

We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares are set about us, and there is nothing which should intimidate or worry us. We are set down in life as in the element to which we best correspond, and over and above this we have through thousands of years of accommodation become so like this life, that when we hold still we are, through a happy mimicry, scarcely to be distinguished from all that surrounds us. We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful. How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.

Details:

Scapes

My roommate Dave decided to get his foot in this picture:

I have been working on these three small paintings for a group show on April 1st called "Scapes". They are all 16x20 and despite the fact that I never paint oils that small they have been going well. I did some before an after pictures and although they were shot in different lighting I have to say that the before pictures are looking better to me. I will have to go down to the studio and figure this out! Yea, actually it's the lighting...some parts haven't changed and just look better in the before pictures because of the photo.

March Poetry

3/15/11

I want to reflect upon your story

But the light shines too harshly.

All that white pierces my eyes.

Chopin’s Nocturnes hang overhead

Humming what cannot be said.

Your glare is muddled with fear.

Like so many others you draw

A conclusion wet and hanging

Unable to dry

In your dark, corner room.

The most beautiful magic of life

Has escaped your broken body

But there it lies in the clear water

Of your deep, blue pools.

When will you grow brave and restless

And go into the woods and stay there?

This skin must dry up and shed

Or stay limp and moist,

Cover up and hold hostage

Your rotting, internal love.

3/16/11

Woe is the artist who cannot sleep.

Dead is the sleeper who never dreams.

Like mossy vines my tendrils creep.

Jealous, they cling

But they can’t strangle concrete.

My body screams and weeps.

The sound of sex falls at my knees.

Still, tall and firm, I snap easily

Like a twig, surrendering,

Yielding my sap to admirers of Nature

Who cradle and rock my broken bones

Then drop me like a cat.

Thus, I write, I paint, I sing,

And I dream,

But simply as a means.

Starving Artist

Mania

There's a lot of stuff going on in the studio right now. Everything from birch bark to collaborative work to oil paintings. The past month or so has allowed a generous liberation of previously tied down energy. This past week especially has been very fruitful.

It is good!

It is good except for this annoying blood blister that I gave myself while clumsily assembling stretcher bars:

UGH

Nice place to go swimming :)

I wonder if there's a jelly fish hiding down there...

Oooommmm

Lavender of course

Phil on top, me on the bottom

Phil vs. Me

Drawing of me done by Phil

Myself 3 times

Crazy hair inspired by Phil's initial drawing

Birch bark from Walden Pond finding it's new tentative home

Walden birch bark painting in process

Some oils in process

Oil in process

Dark cathartic ugly schizoid self portrait

The Most Beautiful Dream

Not all of my dreams are nightmares about Black Swan or interactions confused with real life. Sometimes they are of a beautiful jelly fish swimming peacefully in a deep night's sea.

Phil and Katie

I made more paintings with my friend Phil!