my feelings exactly

blues

I had posted earlier that I would change this image - the leg finally got to me. I know when I drew it that the leg felt right - but the process of moving and adding skewed it out of place - There was nothing left to do (for me) but to go in and move things around with the blunt force of a Q tip dipped in ink.

Today is a heavy blues day. Almost more sadness than I can hold. Nothing to do but paint. That's all that will help. 

process

my mind is the page. one day i realized that having my mind in my head got in the way. part of the process is streamlining the process - and i realized that my mind wasn't serving me well in my head. 

i tend to over think things. i once had a teacher who told me - don't think so much. this helps keep me level - to remember that the page is my mind. this way i don't think in my head, where things are impossible, but on a plane where things are happening - where the material and my body are telling me what the image can be. my head has all kinds of ideas for what an image can be. mostly other people's ideas. other people and influences can't get on the page. on the page is just me and my media. the page is my mind.

think of it like this. when i drive, my mind becomes the road. maybe it's the same way with you and you don't realize it. think how smooth you drive - a painting can feel like that - a painting can feel like flying down the left lane passing the trucks and people from out of town. a painting can feel like working my way through traffic - all moves toward freedom. 

i think sometimes when people are frustrated, their mind is in their head and the page and the media they're using are foreign objects that they feel they should control. these things resist control. but when my mind is on the page - when my mind and the page are one! - then all works as in a prayer - a prayer of listening and stillness.

maybe the rhizome is making a comeback

Horizontal structures seem to be appearing - or becoming necessary. 

sinus pressure cruise

now that I halve your attention

I don't normally repeat - at least consciously; unconsciously is a different thing. Or you can unpack what Deleuze in Difference and Repetition means by "Something isn't repeated because it's unconscious; it becomes unconscious because it's repeated." - or something like that. Anyway, I've taken a couple of things lately and repeated them. This first image is a repetition of an earlier image drawn in Poetry. 

In memory I've lost some of the intensity obtained in a symbol just happening, unpremeditated. I misremembered the central figure as drawing the eye on the page - instead in the drawing, she's reaching for an eye on a page, as a universal eye watches her.

So I'll have to try again. But that is the benefit.

This is not a repetition so much as an instance where I've returned to an image with watercolor and ink. I drew this image on the train leaving Chicago for Schaumberg. Something about the name Mount Prospect struck me. Maybe it was the midwestern fullness of the pre-taped voice announcing the station. 

trope

Walloped

Along the Eno

October

September Song

chance image

waiting for me

I like Brueggemann's advice in Endlich kommt Dichter an - that the sermon is not about a point, a thing to be driven home in some kind of partisan argument; but that the sermon is about opening up the imagination, restoring some flexibility to the ego, and seeing a different world, a world filled with God love in a planar organizational structure: no gurus, no executives - just people seeing each other as human and therefore objects of kindness.

shorter ending ending

it really is in your head

Make things.  All the resistances, all the objects that threaten - the whole competitive make up of society - it really is in your head, and my head, and the head of some other person. There is evidence that certain people  are well known or that there is a current style. There is also the evidence that most of us determine none of this. We can only determine it for ourselves.

Hence: Make things. Don't wait to be authorized. Don't wait to be validated. Learn to make the blank surface your mind. Get your mind out of your skull, that is. Be with the image coming together. By Learn, I mean Practice. Learning too often implies that I  or you need to get something from me or someone else. Your self is the factory of your work.