June 2011: A Month That Will Live In Infamy (at least for me).

June pretty much sucked all the way through. On the first I got a speeding ticket in the last 5 miles of my sixty mile commute. The following Monday I discovered that my tire was flat at 6:00 am as I headed to work; I spent most of my day dealing with that. That Friday I was unexpectedly and very rudely dismissed from my job. I battled depression and an intestinal infection with mixed results throughout the month. By the end of June I was ready to find a new career path, but I realized I had almost no transferable skills of any value. I felt hopeless and in need of some inspiration. It was cloudy almost every day as well. All in all one of the worst months of my life, and hopefully for a long time to come.

June Poem:

To Do List

Desire toward fulfillment

and purple dye

Drop all pretense

Make obsessions that work

Dump Run

June Dreams:

6/17 

A charismatic and athletic white male friend, with bright winning smile, is in a relationship with a short  middle-aged latina, with long black hair and still shapely body. She runs with him and can’t keep up, though she tries hard. She breathes hard and her face is flushed as she pumps her arms and her small legs move awkwardly because she wears platform shoes and tight pants. She falls behind but he doesn’t slow down.

“You should take it easy on her; she’s 55 you know,” I told him.

He looks back at her and smiles a smile of  love and acceptance as she struggles to catch up.

6/30

A little girl in a white nightgown appears as I approach. She wakes up in mid-sentence talking about her 2 kittens in as if she has a PhD in Kittenology, specific to the cuteness of her kittens.

The house across the street looks abandoned and looms mysteriously. Its blank suburbanness telling about some dark secret inside. It is a house that I lived across the street from when I was 9 years old. The family left suddenly leaving all kinds of strange paper piled and scattered about inside.

That same year a dog from down the street killed our cat as my brother, sister and I watched. That dogs owner was attacked by a cat and developed cat-scratch fever and died– some bizarre cycle of cosmic retribution or karmic ripple. What had we done to enter into to its flow? Maybe the scientific torture we wreaked on the ant colonies in our yard the previous summer.

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Working in Timeless Space

Just playing around with Photoshop Elements and some of my images from this year.

I just started working on a photo and lost all track of time.

When I came to it was 5 hours later and I had come up with these colorful abstracts.

When I am manipulating colors and forms I am so engrossed in the transformations,

I travel to a different place in my mind where time does not exist-

a place where the world of people and things that make up my usual reality is muffled and dim in the shadows.

When I return to my normal mind space, if I have been successful, the work I did in the other space is still vibrant and intriguing to me.

But I am not sure of their value as images.

They are like treasure I have excavated of which I now get to discover the more discrete aspects.  

When I look at other peoples art I try to imaging the process of exploration that lead the artist to whatever image I am examining, but if it speaks to me there is also that part of other peoples art that moves through me, transforming waves of emotion. There are times in which I can do that to myself. These are the times that I love being an artist.

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Some Parts of My Creative Process Illustrated

Immersion

Reflection

Illumination

Fusion

formulation

Inspiration

There is no particular order or combination of occurrence. Sometimes one will happen without  any of the others; this can lead to frustration or apathy, not to mention the acquisition of tools and materials that may never get used.

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Just Outside the Wine Crate at Sunset

I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star!

Friedrich Nietzsche

and there is no object so soft, but makes a hub for the whole universe,

and I say to any man or woman, Let your soul stand cool and composed,

before a million universes

Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

I dwell in Possibility–

A fairer House than Prose–

More numerous of Windows–

Superior– for Doors–

Of Chambers as the Cedars–

Impregnable of Eye–

And for an Everlasting Roof

The Gambrels of the Sky–

Of Visitors– the fairest–

For Occupation–This–

The spreading wide of my narrow Hands

To gather Paradise–

Emily Dickinson

Creations of the mind are more alive than matter.

Charles Baudelaire, Fuses I and II

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Ink and Vellum II

Ritual Armor

Connective Tissue (color)

Connective Tissue (gray scale)

Overlapping Connective Tissues (color)

Overlapping Connective Tissue (gray scale)

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