ArtTalkToday

a wedding, a thunderstorm and This

2011-10-07T21:25:00.004-05:00

Last night time fell apart.

It’s happened before. Scary…like dying. Usually I faint. After that everything goes back to normal. I suppose this is a way of not allowing myself to fall apart along with time, which has broken down into increasingly slower wavelengths.

First everything synchronizes—the music, the dance, me dancing, the dancers….I feel we are tuning-up—random sounds, groupings of people, a slight raise of the hand, the repetition of a blue cup, a water bottle appears before I knew I would need it, it was there anyway.

There was a time when I trusted

So at first there were gaps in the rapid vibration. Something someone wrote about Lucy— that has defined it for me ever since— it was as if I existed, or rather as if I were being pressed b e t w e e n seconds where time winds-down, flattens, circles everywhere around me. I had to sit still. I am barely breathing my body has come to a standstill. Fragments of sentences enter, unfiltered, some from a long time ago, some from earlier in the evening. Everything mixed together rather than remaining linear as past—present

there was no mixing with the future.

I wanted to tell Nic that this is dying, this slowing down of the vibration, of attuning my rhythm to This, that this IS the black hole, that we cannot separate Science and Consciousness, that this is what I laid in the grass and thought about when I took physics for the first time at 19… I realized that I am the Tree above my head, that we are exchanging particles as I lay here, with the tree, with the air molecules, the stranger passing by

“Are we leaving at ten?”

Time was falling…no…it was opening and I was sliding in. breathing slower still. Shallower. Slower. Heavier. Lengthening. until I could no longer move and I realized with a gasp of air that I would die if I allowed myself to attune to this. I had to move. Keep moving. Speed up my vibration so I would not die. This made me very nauseous. I threw-up, each time more violently. I needed someplace to be Still. I lay down in the back of the van but it stimulated a nightmare, lying with my head against a chain that ended in a hook. I Knew what this was for, there were four of them, they held down Nathan’s chair. But lying like this brought images of a prison, of torture, of darkness. I couldn’t stay there, but to move made me so nauseous. I made it out of the van, but threw-up three times before I found a comfortable position on the grass, wet from several luck-filled thunderstorms and a bright rainbow.

This IS the truth. A vibrating field in which we are free agents, attuning to frequencies at will, if not consciously

“forgive them for….”

preachers run in our bloodline

but no one in three generations have taken that on

we have our reasons

I could not call it out, but I Know…I was witness, victim, perpetrator…

everything conflates

I saw the space between seconds

I felt time stop moving

It can’t be separated from vibration

which is life

which is sound

which is color

which is light

which is heat

which is life

On Becoming Civilized

2011-04-06T18:12:00.004-05:00

I'm learning Italian, the language of my father's family. The "vulgarized" version of the language of the Holy Roman Empire out of which developed my beloved French as well as Spanish and Portuguese.

I'm learning to think in Italian, the language of Dante's Inferno, damning to a fiery tomb those who believe the heresy that life is worth living fully because death is nothing more than the end of life.

I'm learning to hear Italian, the language Frederico denied infants in cruel experiments to find out what language, Latin or vulgari, the children would naturally speak. Naturally, they died.

I'm learning to live in Italian, in waves of rolling rrrr's and fountains gushing from Bernini's elegant whirling forms, the Bernini whose mistress becomes Saint Theresa, her jouissance becomes in Italian, godimento, something God-like, preserved in the Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome where gilded rays of light illuminate her cloud-like bed. I am pierced with the thrust of this flame, of life beating between me and my lover, weeping in this ecstasy of union. Is this religion?

Art for Life

2010-10-27T11:19:00.007-05:00

Pacia Sallomi, Premonition of Jerry’s Passing, oil on canvas, 48” x 48”, 2001

This summer I had the opportunity to work with seventeen senior citizens and eight university students on a project I called, Art for Life. I wanted to do this because I think we get it all wrong in our society. We have relegated the arts to entertainment and our elders to the sidelines. In this project, we met over the course of ten sessions, at the Milwaukee Art Museum and at the Jewish Home in Milwaukee, to look at art and to create. This experience has reinforced my feeling that art is an essential human process that is intimately linked with our understanding and expression of being alive.

James Hillman’s book The Force of Character is enlightening about the process of growing old, of living and of dying. He says that aging is an enigma that “is expressed in each one of us but its underlying nature remains a mystery.” That it is not about “letting go of life” but is instead a thoughtful and profound experience of one’s life-long development of character and that the “symptoms” of aging (physical, emotional and mental changes) are vital for the formation of wisdom.

My interest in working with the elderly and art has developed gradually. It was my step-father’s passing in August of 2001 that made me realize how connected dying is to how we have lived and to the transition that is at both ends of that living. From 1979 until 1992, I attended homebirths. When I arrived at my mother’s home to be with my stepfather in home hospice, I was deeply moved by the realization that sitting with him was very much like sitting with a woman in labor. There was a natural ebb and flow of his consciousness, a rally, a period of grace, and the final transition. He knew death was back to take him. He had us nearby. He was not afraid. That he had worked most of his life as a Jungian Psychiatrist probably helped. He had an incredibly rich and insightful dream life. After I left, he told my mother that she had to send me a bouquet of sunflowers with a very urgent message. It had to be done now, however, 2am was not practical, so it happened the next morning.

I think of my stepfather every time I watch seagulls. I remember watching the gulls float on the sea currents, rising over cliffs along the Oregon coast and then swooping down the coastline. I was smiling. He asked me if I thought they were experiencing joy. I thought about it for a lot longer than required to answer what I felt because I knew he was asking if my experience of their joy was my projection, or their experience. In the end, I said yes, I think the gulls are having a wonderful time up there and I wanted to fly with them. He didn’t say anything so I never knew for sure what he thought about that until after he died when I asked my mother. She said, of course he would agree with my answer, he saw everything as conscious. This made me indescribably happy, and sad.

Before I learned of the severity of his condition, I had begun the painting titled, “Premonition of Jerry’s Passing” based on a dream I had had. When I left him the last time, the last time I would ever see him, I woke up to a very generous bouquet of large sunflowers, all turning towards the bedroom window, with a note attached: “It’s easy, you just go through the light.”

So it was my work as a midwife, my Jungian stepfather, and my experiences as an artist that inspired me to want to work with elders in my community. It has changed me.

What I learned.

Greet everyone. I am, by nature, a bit shy. To be a teacher requires overcoming this tendency to want to hole up in my shell and safely look out on the world from there. But over the years of teaching, I just adapted a different kind of protective coating that had more to do with talking to a group. Ellie, an art therapist who worked with us said that if we greet each participant as they come into the room they will feel more comfortable entering the new space of the art room and that these connections are critical. When we greet each new person as the individual that they are we create a very open space in which to explore our responses to art and in which we are willing to try new things. In working with elders, I learned to check my shell at the door.
Be honest. It is not important that the work be pretty. It is important that my response to it is real. One of the most challenging projects was a self-portrait. Here we have all the intimidations of making the drawing look accurate, typically beyond one’s means after a two-hour lesson, and then we have the bundle of self-image issues and perhaps also movement restrictions that come with age. In a conversation about one portrait with a participant who was not happy with it, I said I thought it was very expressive. He asked me what I thought it expressed. I said sadness and told him why I felt that way, the white space, the elongated form, the vertical lines on the shirt that echoed, perhaps, the memory of having been in the camps during WWII… He said that yes, he was sad. He is ninety-one years old, he said, and “I have lived here for five years. I thought I would be dead by now.”
Be real. We were working on a mixed-media project and I had just introduced oil pastels. One participant was using her finger to try to blend the pastels and I picked up a clear wax pastel and showed her how she could more effectively blend with this tool. She became furious and yelled at me that I had ruined her drawing and that I had no right to draw on her drawing. She is mostly deaf and in this upset state, her voice was booming and a bit difficult to decipher. I felt embarrassed. But she was right. I told her that she was absolutely right, I should have showed her how to use the technique on a different sheet of paper. I asked her forgiveness. She forgave me. I resisted the desire to avoid working directly with her for fear of being blasted again and we developed a warm and respectful friendship. We are all human.

Death and Life in Paris

2010-07-19T15:32:00.012-05:00

#1: Nicolas Rubinstein, 2006, © Jean-Alex Brunelle, Exhibition: Vanités, Musée Maillol

#2: Niki de Saint Phalle, 1988, © Gallery JGM, Exhibition: Vanités, Musée Maillol

#3: from New Guinea, Exhibition: Musée Branly

“Remember that you are going to die.”

Paris is the embodiment of sensuous experience: enjoyment of the fine arts, music, culinary experiences paired with excellent wine and if you’re lucky, love. But also the malefic sensory experiences of excessively crowded streets, noise, pollution, shit on the sidewalks. I suppose I should not have been surprised that the theme of my recent experiences in Paris museums was to be centered on ideas about death; perhaps the single most motivating encounter with sensual life—its absence.

Remembering that life is short perhaps arouses us to more fully enjoy the good things that come our way, however brief. Remembering that life is short is sometimes all that can be said about the subject of Vanitas painting traditions, but putting 160 of them together, ranging from Pompeii mosaics (1^st century) to Marina Abramovic (2008), does nothing to inspire us about how to approach life or death—or art for that matter. The Musée Maillol exhibition, C’est La Vie! Vanités de Caravage à Damien Hirst, perhaps puts forward, with a few exceptions, the inability of contemporary art to create affect, thus emphasizing the Latin root of vanitas—emptiness. If there is a desire in this exhibition to explore the spiritual fragmentation of western society and invite viewers to find meaning beyond this collection of skulls, a poignant contrast of these representations next to the skulls from Indonesia at the Musée Branly down the road, would emphasize the potent ancestor rituals associated with the later and the vacuous desire to make art out of symbols in the former. It strikes me that the skulls at Branly were not created as ‘art’ and yet our understanding of their purpose in society—as part of a process of connecting the past to the present, to transform death into a nourishing present—would certainly be a part of how we would hope to be inspired by art.

Hugues Fourau, Fieschi's Decapitated Head

Exhibition: Crime & Punishment, musée d'Orsay

The city of light explores death through another exhibition this summer at the Musée d’Orsay titled after Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment.” This historically fascinating exhibition explores the problem of murder and social response to it, beginning with Cain but mostly focusing on the 200-year dialogue about capital punishment from 1791 to its abolition in France in 1981. Here is an exhibition that brings together a vast array of objects (from the guillotine to fine art) organized to shed light on difficult questions without providing simplistic answers. Bravo to the curators, Jean Clair, Phillipe Comar and Laurence Madeline! There is so much to be said about this show, but what ultimately affected me, after hours of intense exploration of the questions of violence in society, of how we have dealt with it, analyzing mass violence and individual murder, the victim, the murderer, art and its “aestheticizing” of violence, science and its “objectifying” explanations…. Why does one murder? What are the characteristics of a murderer? Is it an aberration of humanity, a mental illness? Is justice possible in the face of all of this? Are some forms of murder heroic? —after all of this, we are left off in the last room with the surrealists and a few others. By this time I am almost ill from the overwhelming ingestion of callous brutality, but the final painting sent me running for the fresh air of the postimpressionists at the far end of the museum. It was a large, and truly ugly painting (shouldn’t a painting about violence be ugly?) by film director David Lynch in which a man is portrayed on the left side of the canvas, and a woman, apparently his rape victim, on the right. A short dialogue is written on the painting. He asks her if she wants to know what he really thinks? She answers, a resounding NO.

Aboriginal Painting

2010-05-19T10:31:00.009-05:00

Icons of the Desert: Early Aboriginal Paintings from Papunya

Grey Gallery, New York City, fall 2009

Why make paintings? Ritual and ceremony. Transfer knowledge. Experience and the preservation of experience. Birth of new beauty. Evocation of memory.

Papunya paintings seem to be indices of power for initiates but the rest of us who lack this knowledge are barred from full comprehension. We can speak about their beauty, as a mystery or as a formal composition, but not as revelation.

But these paintings were sold, then auctioned, collected, exhibited. Original Papunya paintings were created on the body or on the ground–washed or blown away–or incised into rock and maintained by shamans to protect the community. They were made and remade. But what of these paintings sold off to the west and admired for their beauty and the unknowable mystery they embody? What do they mean for us?

The artist insists that these paintings come from something–they are not merely "made-up stories." They come from Tjukkurrtjanu–from the dreaming, the cosmic realm from which all shape and meaning emerge–and they are connected to the men's ngurra (ancestral country) ... They are not to be looked at as "pretty pictures." They are powerful and dangerous, gold, precious.

And then I wonder again, why are they sold? My cynical western mind understands the value of the unattainable that has its price.

Art offers and conceals.

The only way I know to understand these works is not by looking, but through doing. So I made my first "aboriginal" work in 1997, and my second in 2009. And I am still asking...

What is the drive to paint? Is it a desire to preserve something ineffable? Is it telling a story that we hope will pass on some of the wisdom of our ancestors and the experience of our lived life? Is it an expression of our search or of our knowledge? Is it to create an imprint of form on the world from that which is essentially formless? Is it to remind us of the mystery without making it less mysterious? These are all serious matters.

My question is, when did painting become about pretty pictures and made-up stories? When did we, western world, loose our connection to what it means to paint?

*reference for this entry: Grey Gazette, Vol 12, No 1, Fall 2009, by Fred Myers

A Place To Celebrate

2009-10-04T13:34:00.004-05:00

Judy Chicago,et al, The Dinner Party, 1974-1979

This summer I saw The Dinner Party for the first time at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art in the Brooklyn Museum. I have been thinking about how to write about this experience since. It was created when I was coming of age in the San Francisco Bay Area. I never called myself a feminist. I just was born into a certain kind of thinking about what it meant to be a woman. From 1979 until 1992 I was surrounded by the world of women through my work as a homebirth midwife, editorial work for a national parenting magazine and being a single mother of two. Since 1992, I have immersed myself in art and find myself increasingly excluded from a sense of community that I had felt as a midwife—which was inherently outside of the mainstream and squarely in the center of a larger, more unified experience of Life. Being in the full installation of The Dinner Party is an experience of this immersion, of inclusion, of an ancestral history that we are all a part of. It is a meditative, empowering and peaceful homage.

The installation is enclosed in a darkened room, the center is occupied by a triangular table, a ceremonial banquet with thirty-nine place settings each commemorating an important woman from pre-history to contemporary times such as: Ishtar, Kali, Hypatia, Hatshepsut, Judith, Marcella, Hildegard of Bingen, Artemisia Gentileschi, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Georgia O’Keeffe… Another 999 names are written out on the floor tiles. Each place setting features an embroidered table runner, napkin, utensils, a glass or goblet and a ceramic plate that has symbols of vulva-like, flower-like, butterfly-like, opening forms that also suggest the receptivity and depth of femaleness. The work is a collaborative effort of some 200 women and celebrates traditional crafts such as textile arts and china painting.

It was problematic for the male-dominated art world for several reasons. It challenged the Solitary Male Artist myth through the public acknowledgement of the work as a collaborative effort (even to the extent of acknowledging those who helped maintain the project from its creation until its permanent housing.) Throughout the history of art there have been unnamed others who participated in the creation of the work from artisan guilds to Warhol’s Factory and the production of Jeff Koons’ work where the artist has become merely the ‘idea’ and production is done by unnamed others. So The Dinner Party acknowledges this collaborative process, but even more importantly, it is a dialogue about the issue of erasure of individuals from history—women, minority races, impoverished classes, all of us without a voice.

Other points of controversy with The Dinner Party have been its distinctly female content, which was created in a heroic, ambitious scale; that the media used was not generally considered “fine art” and that the content was discussed as “cunt art.”

That this work has finally, in 2007, found a permanent home is something to celebrate, a place to bring your daughters and sons.

Tango and Feminism

2009-08-18T16:45:00.005-05:00

Pacia Sallomi, Queremos Bailar, 2008, oil on canvas, 60" x 70"

I first heard it described this way: Tango is the dance that best expresses the relationship between the sexes. The man proposes, the woman disposes.

Of course, the woman can also lead, the man can also follow. In fact, really good dancers can do both. But Tango is more than this; it is essentially about communication, which is why it was stated as proposing and disposing… rather than leading and following. Movements are suggested in subtle ways, through almost imperceptible intentions (at least to an outside observer) that are transmitted through the couple’s connection. It is a dance of invention, of listening to each other, of feeling the other’s desire and responding; thus both partners are simultaneously active and receptive. There is an interdependence in this dance that cannot be achieved if each partner is not also fully in their own center, in their own axis. In this way it is a pure expression of the masculine and the feminine principles in balance with each other.

Tango history in brief….

Tango developed in the barrios of Buenos Aires in the end of the 19^th century by African-Argentines. It was considered immoral, having a degenerative effect because of its racial origins and sexual charge. The dance has experienced continual renewal of form and style as well as social acceptability, spreading to Europe and North America in the early part of the 20^th century. The dance (and its music) is an intriguing juxtaposition of tragedy and beauty, of sex and of death, of seduction and of abandonment. Tango is an active listening, a silent conversation with a partner. The dialogue is a subtle conversation of the body rather than of the mind. The mind is silent, the body is active and responsive for both partners.

Why I like Tango…

I began learning to dance Argentine Tango in December 2005. My desire to learn this dance is complicated by my history of dance and my autonomous, independent spirit. To translate this bodily experience into a visual medium has also been a journey. I straddle the desire to represent and to express. Color is primary in my work as an expressive element and as definition of shape. I look at these paintings as experiments…I am still searching for the perfect expression of this dance in paint. This challenges me. What also challenges me is that I had to let go of my need to move independently, I resisted following (in every way, all my life so the dance was not at all natural for me.) At first, when I “gave into” following a man’s lead, I also “gave” him my weight and center. The dance floundered. I felt unstable and unsure and hated when my partner didn’t listen to the music or I could find a hundred more creative things to be doing then what he was choosing at that moment. Then I went to Buenos Aires.

In Argentina I found the women to be powerful and centered in their dance and I learned from them. I found the men to be responsive to my body in very sensitive ways. I was seduced by the dance to be as fully present in my body as he was in his. I found power in receptivity and I found that the best male partners are listening. I found that my ideas about machismo have been transformed. Having grown up with the various waves of feminism, I now find myself expanding again what it means to be a woman and loving it.

What's Fine About the Arts

2009-07-16T14:03:00.025-05:00

Mark Morris Dance Group at Zellerbach Hall (1988, performance 2009)

George Frederic Handel’s L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato (1740)

Pastoral ode after poems by John Milton (1645)
rearranged by Charles Jennens in 1740

Conductor: Jane Glover

Chamber Chorus of UC Berkeley

Costume designer: Christine Van Loon

Lighting designer: James F Ingalls

Set designer: Adrianne Lobel

Handel wrote L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato in seventeen days in 1740 during one of the coldest winters in London’s recorded history and during what might be also called a “dark night of the soul” in his own career. The work personifies two of Milton’s poems written approximately 100 years earlier, “L’Allegro” – The Joyful Man, and “Il Penseroso” – The Contemplative Man. Handel’s librettist, Charles Jennens added a third voice “Il Moderato” as a sort of middle-man, a tempered, rational side to moderate the other two more extreme states of man. About 250 years later, Mark Morris choreographed Handel into a work of Contemporary Art with such heart-felt precision, such integration of all the Fine Arts that it can only be described as Beauty personified.

Yes, Beauty. For years the experience of Beauty, as well as the value of Art, has been demeaned by the semantics of postmodern analysis to the point of being unable to define either Art or Beauty, unable to experience the harmony of integration. In our attempts and inability to define it exactly, or to separate what is Art from what is any other activity, we have leveled Art in the minds of citizens and thus have diminished access to its cathartic, uplifting, humanizing experience. All of the arts from Modernism to the present day separated this from that, form from content, color from shape, sound from melody, words from narrative. Many interesting insights were gained from this, new vocabularies emerged, but something also was lost, something also became a pile of missing pieces.

In a 1999 interview Mark Morris emphasizes that his dance is always about the music. And while it was a fruitful exercise to explore, à la Merce Cunningham and John Cage et al, what happens when we separate Dance from Music, or even Music from Instruments, Dance Is About Music. This is one thing that is viscerally present in a Mark Morris performance, the precise union of the dancers and the music, a union that creates a synergetic response in the audience—augmenting the feeling of elevation and of depression. Something larger begins to take place during the performance; more than the movements of a single dancer or instrument, more than the synchronistic sensory experience of body and sound, of actor and receiver, something vibrates in the entire theatre. Everything has been choreographed to this end—the stage scrims and lighting evoke Rothko paintings, the simple costumes of paired colors that interact in various formations. We are carried into the depths of Melancholy and from that place are not told to take anti-depressants, but instead Milton reminds us:

May at last my weary age

Find out the peaceful hermitage,

The hairy gown, and mossy cell

Where I may sit and rightly spell

Of ev’ry star that Heav’n doth shew,

And ev’ry herb that sips the dew;

Till old experience do attain

To something like prophetic strain.

These pleasures, Melancholy, give,

And I with thee will choose to live.

These pleasures, Melancholy, give,

And we with thee will choose to live.

And finally, through all the movements of this complex work, we come back to L’Allegro and the conviction that indeed we will live although our eyes filled with tears of sorrow and of joy….

Orpheus’ self may heave his head,

From golden slumbers on a bed

Of heap’d Elysian flow’rs, and hear

Such strains as would have won the ear

Of Pluto, to have quite set free

His half-regain’d Eurydice.

These delights if thou canst give,

Mirth, with thee I mean to live.

These delights if thou canst give,

Mirth, with thee we mean to live.

mirth, with thee we mean to live!

on interiors

2009-06-22T10:10:00.000-05:00

Bonnard, Vuillard, Matisse… famous for their paintings of the domestic life that surrounded them—lush fabric patterns and intimate spaces, celebrations of domesticated spaces, of the curved line and sensuous color. Appreciation for what is distinctly not male, by distinctive men. They are interiors, but are they interior?

I'm thinking about these things because I recently saw an exhibition of Squeak Carnwath at the Oakland Museum. These are personal pictographic compositions. Journal-like. Interior mind spaces granting permission to find “guilt free zones” within herself and for her friend who died of cancer, and for her viewers who are reminded of the way we torture ourselves. These paintings are coded narratives that the artist generously shares with her public in a video playing in another room. They are large, textured surfaces that are sometimes layered and buttery, sometimes abrasive, wound-like and raw. In her vocabulary, there is both random chaotic space and an ordered, grid-like, numerical, structured space. Sometimes one takes over the other. Sometimes they are relegated to their own side of the canvas, sometimes one exists only as a small reminder, a patch of order in the midst of disorder, a small swatch of rectangular color samples, or the countdown of days lived. A woman in the battleground of her evolving self… I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry…. she says a thousand times in black paint.

I'm thinking about these things because I recently saw an exhibition of TL Solien at the Haggerty Museum in Milwaukee. These are also private stories inhabited by cartoon-like figures, knickknacks, clothing scattered about and distorted home furnishings. They are distinctly contemporary in the flat color spaces that fill the frame with a pattern-like movement. These paintings are immediately attractive, a visual candy store of enticing color and shapes--familiar, but not quite knowable. A narrative, yet the story is incomprehensible. We don't mind. They don't insist on revealing their private tale, nor do they suggest a cultural story. They remind me that things just happen, simultaneously, leaving a trail of objects stacked on top of one another, remnants of experience that seem to animate each other as if in a secret dialogue. I heard him talk about these paintings, for two hours, about the problems in his marriage, his snoring, his having to sleep in the basement bedroom. In the space of these paintings, in these private conversations with things that seem to transform into “not-things”, he isn't really talking to you, the viewer, but you can listen in if you want.

T.L. Solien Small Room, oil and enamel on canvas 60” x 72”

And I'm thinking about these things because of the inner necessity that always drives an artist. It is what is interior that makes the work unique; what makes Bonnard, Bonnard and Matisse, Matisse. It is the eloquence of that expression seen from the distance of time that makes a work of art really great. Who is your audience? Who is listening? Is this a question the artist has to answer? The artist is inside looking in, even when they are looking out.

on smallness and gray

2009-05-24T10:34:00.000-05:00

It is May. The sky is flat gray. Rain drops in sheets. The tree outside my window waves and shakes periodically, each branch fuzzy with a scrunched-up cluster of green that will burst open tomorrow, maybe tomorrow. Today it is crumpled like newborn skin.

From across the room the painting I just stopped working on looks muddy, pointless. I started with a gray hexagon and surrounded it with gray-greens. A hint of red at the bottom. It should probably be a rusty orange. I was inspired by Kenzo Okada's large painting, "Hexagon." I hadn't gone to the museum this morning because of this painting, but rather to see three canvases by a favorite French artist in a nearby room. In fact, I had never looked at "Hexagon" before. I don't know why I was inspired by it today. I just liked looking at it. I liked the textures and the harmonious use of color—of grays especially. Is that enough? Does it have to have critical content, be part of a significant discovery, a lineage of artists? Do I have to know this? I look again at my painting. Does it have be large and hanging in a museum to be Art? Mine is a modest 10 x 8 inches.

The sun spreads out the gray clouds and makes the sky white, now yellow. My small painting seems to open up in this new light—subtle textures and shifts in value under the gray hexagon are more pronounced. The tree is now glowing with yellow contours and backlit by deep shadows. None of this has any critical content. My painting is a part of this. That is all.

If I hadn't gone to graduate school, perhaps I wouldn't have been agonizing for so long about what I have been spending my time doing. If I weren't an art professor, perhaps I wouldn't always be trying to put words to this…to color on canvas, to the way the light is divided as it is filtered through the rubber plant that stands taller than me in front of the sliding glass door.

I critique my instincts. Why am I painting canvases the size of a piece of writing paper? Because… I feel small and have only small things to say. I don't want to be surrounded by large statements. I want tiny poem fragments that say more than they seem to. A line like Rilke's epitaph— Rose, oh pure contradiction, desire/to be no one's sleep under so many/lids.

Love's rose, love's desire, and life's inherent contradiction—just as we come to full bloom, we enter the realm of death—that in fact we begin towards death the moment we come into life—that in fact our dying is ever present. At the very core of the rose, at the very center of existence, there is nothingness. Nothing. We are devastated by this knowledge. Consumed by it. Threatened by all the space that exists between the particles of matter. This painting—particles of matter—and nothingness.

The sky has turned pale blue between puffy white clouds streaked with lavender-gray. The air has become soft and still. In the morning fog I had gone to the museum to see old friends—three paintings by Nicolas de Staël. But then, standing in front of them, all I could think about was that he painted them three, two, one year before he jumped out his studio window and died.

Tomorrow, perhaps, the leaves will unfold. Tomorrow, perhaps, I will add a streak of rusty orange.