October 7, 2022 Weekly Musings

Featured image: Milkweed Pods

Every fall my mom would go on a boat ride with my dad and I. Sometimes my sister would come along. She didn’t like looking for the dried weeds that my mom was searching for. My mom would spray the weeds with gold paint and make a beautiful fall arrangement for our dinner table. 90% of the time, if they were open when we went, we would end up with milkweed pods.

When we returned to the house, if they hadn’t shed all their feathered parachutes, we would sit outside and clean the shells out to make my mom’s beautiful arrangements. Then, we would spray the pods gold. We always put these arrangements in the silver aluminum pitcher that my grandmother used to have to be displayed as a beautiful arrangement on the table.

We did the same thing with dried hydrangea blossoms in the fall, always using the silver aluminum vase.
I was named after my mom’s mom. And I still have that vase along with the aluminum tray that my grandmother had. Back then, Aluminum was like a poor man's silver and my grandma and mom treasured it as I do today.

The milkweed pods and the hydrangeas are in my gardens. They are treasures for both me and the monarch butterflies. I don’t spray them gold, but still treasure them in their natural states.

Featured image: Kaleidoscope of Raw Reality

Space, how do you think of the word space? I was asked this question in a graduate seminar. My immediate answer was the one I had been taught through the elements and principles of art – there is positive and negative space.

Forms take up space and create positive and negative spaces. Of course, that wasn’t the correct answer according to the person who asked the question. This simple question has made me think about space and how we think about it. My dominant conception of space is the one I have learned through the arts. But, the other space the questioner was thinking of was discursive space. I know, I know…….big idea, it got my mind going and it was questions like this one that have become part of my history and my foundation of conceptual art, and being a wordy. I question all words and their meaning. But let me give you an example.

Let’s consider the concept of freedom – and space. The freedom of those who reside in the middle is so completely different from my personal “freedom” space. My work, "La De Da,”  is an excellent example of the Middle Space. There are many elements of those who live in the middle and how they get along while they allow others their personal space. There is only one element for me and my personal space and freedom. For me, I visualize standing on the shores of Lake Superior as I look off to the horizon and see a calm day. I see how the water meets the sky and it is difficult to differentiate where one ends and the other begins. This space is vast – open. The same happens to me when I sit in a canoe, quietly, listening to the silence alone. A work of mine that wonderfully illustrates this idea is “Kaleidoscope of Raw Reality.”

Both of these are my personal yes, yes, yes space of freedom.

Featured image: Featured image: Pendelum

The sun paints a golden light. A dull pink, orange red sky begins to appear. Gentle winds begin to move clouds overhead. Dawn, the day is beginning.

Yellow tiny finches dart back and forth from the bird bath to the bird feeder, chasing each other, swooping and darting. A young eagle was learning to fly this morning. Mama screeches, “It is ok, you are fine, I am here.” Baby screeches back, “But I am afraid.” What a racket. Eventually the young eagle spread her wings and flew.

A new day begins. There are new things to do, and to create and to experience rebirth. Each day that we have is but a slice in time and space that we can experience. Each slice needs to be totally experienced and enjoyed. One step at a time.

Featured image: Your Inner Compass


The tides are shifting – changing in art. The power behind the concept of “art” is being given away to the collective – the copy, multiples, and poster-like activism. This isn’t new. History has shown it to happen before. But this time, I don’t know if art will ever come back to what it was, something unique and one-of-a-kind, something authentic. The time of the lonely artist in their studio is fading. The time of the brilliant “a ha” moment is becoming less and less. The “A ha” moments like da Vinci had when he was solving a problem and would eventually put the pieces of the puzzle together are beginning to disappear. The time of thought, brilliant and unique, is becoming, “I can do that.” There is a herd mentality of copying another’s work, not having your own idea and duplicating another’s thought to the extent that it is obvious because so many of the collective are doing the same thing. Having your own idea, like da Vinci, and following through on it, feels like a thing of the past.

Da Vinci when asked to solve a problem that no one else could solve, would say to himself, “What is missing? “What do we need? What am I not seeing? What is there but not there?” Da Vinci would use his mind. He didn’t allow others to think for him. Independent, unique, thought came from this mind of his, like the submarine, the flying machine, the anemometer, the parachute, the 33-barreled organ, the triple barrel cannon, the earth, the stars and the moon were all part of da Vinci’s thinking.

Da Vinci was an extreme thinker. His extremes were about possibilities and not about thinking like everyone else. Everyone else would say, “But we have never done it that way before.” History and tradition got in their way when thinking about something.

Collective thinking, I believe, is never creative thinking. Visualize art without the lone individual artist thinking and painting on their own, in their studio and creating. Creative thinking is not the same as collective thinking.
*****

It was very quiet this morning during coffee. I wrote the musing, Shifting Tides, and then I began to listen to the silence of the morning and the Simon and Garfinkles song came to mind: The Sound of Silence. It suits my musing this morning. Here are the lyrics in their entirety.

Lyrics of the Sound of Silence:
Hello darkness, my old friend
I’ve come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence
In restless dreams I walked alone
Narrow streets of cobblestone
‘Neath the halo of a streetlamp

I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light
That split the night
And touched the sound of silence
And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never share
No one dare
Disturb the sound of silence
“Fools” said I, “You do not know
Silence like a cancer grow
Hear my words that I might teach you
Take my arms that I might reach you”
But my words like silent raindrops fell
And echoed in the wells of silence
And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said “The words of the prophets
Are written on subway walls
And tenement halls
And whispered in the sounds of silence”

Featured image: Red Dress

 Featured image: Trumpets In The Garden

it is sunrise 

                   on the earth.

pinkish fuchsia

                 purplish blue

poll of sky.  horsetail clouds

       drift by

lost in a sea

of

        dreaming dreams

        scattering magic.

fairy dust catches 

        golden light.

trumpets of yellow, white, pink

       burnt orange

       bursting in the

      garden.

they too filled with

       fairy dust.

sweet sweetness in

       the air.

it will rain today.

 Featured image: Fields of Green

What is it about fields and fields of tall green grass ?

The grass is so tall that you can slide the palms of your hands across the tops of greenness.

Off in the distance,  an old fence with wires broken.

Surrounds an old barn, cluttered with cobwebs and old bales of hay.

It is fields and fields of memories – of lives lived – 

Close your eyes. Spread your wings,  Twirling, twirling. It is fields and fields of open spaces that go on forever. 

You believe like the fields that you can go forever and someday touch the sky.

Where the sweet smell of green grass and forever sky become one.  

What is it about fields and fields of tall green grass?

So tall you can slide the palms of your hands across its greenness – and walk forever

Trying to reach the forever sky.

Marsh Wren

Featured image: Marsh Wren

Blood fire sunsets

Yellow brown green marsh leaves cat-

Tails  and marsh wren

Downies at the Feeder

Featured image: Red Winged Birds Eating Fruit at the Feeder

Brilliant black and white

Zebra stripes Crowned with red dot 

Downies at the feeder

And He Walks With Me

Imagination

Featured image: Imagination

Imagination, something you always move towards.  Imagination always changes. You are always on a threshold when you engage in your imagination. You are always moving towards the horizon. Imagination never asks you to take a position, move or change your stance. Rather, imagination simply relishes and celebrates the changing horizons and thresholds.

Painting abstractly requires imagination. Imagination never knows ahead of time what the end result will be.  Imagination allows you to think with wonder as you used to as a child.

Blood Red Scarlet

 Synergy of a Work

Rustic Landscape

Featured image: Rustic Landscape

Rustic landscape, returning to the rustic origins of life.

For me painting landscapes with my way of creating does not favor the streamlined – hard edge approach to painting. Rustic landscapes and my methods favor the organic, imperfect, earthy things, handmade things, one-of-a-kind and not mass produced. My way of creating is like nature's way of creating. It is intuitive and deals with the right here and now style, unruly, uncontrollable, ambiguous and something beyond technology's rule.

Feeling Fortunate

Featured image: Feel'n Fortunate

 

feeling so fortun-

ate…to be in tune with her

Mother nature, natural

i trust her she fig-

ured it out, patterns,

chaos storms sunshine, critt

ers… making it work

with the 

cards she is dealt

Everyday.