Dance

It is Halloween, and my first 2 months on the blog have officially ended. I have been trying to open up possibilities for myself through random impulsive images and a mixed media approach. It has been a rather frenzied dance. We will see what the next month brings. I may do some bigger pieces and write more at length about process.
This is dedicated to Meg.

Form Follows Function?

"Form follows function" is a familiar truism all art students will recognize. That means that the look of an object is always connected to its use. Chairs have to have seats; guitars, strings; teapots, spouts.  I would also like to add simply that "love" or if you will "passion" dictates form. When we love anything we find a way to make it part of our lives in any way we can. If an artist loves his subject "motif" than he will find the form that communicates that feeling.

Mother Tree

The trees are coming to life. They are starting to have personalities. Everyone should have a yard like this. This "Mother Tree" has been here a long time, maybe as long as the house and she presides over the yard from the water's edge.

Touch

There is a wonderful old tree in the river right at the water's edge in my yard.  A lot happens there. Roots touch, stingrays glide, ants tunnel, snakes bask, and  debris wafts. Nature moves the bits around.

Even The Water Is Boxed In...

My small protest piece about our destruction of the earth by literally boxing up and commercializing every living thing including land and water.

P. S. Mary and I did this one too although I finished after she left.

Final Debris Yard Spiral Dance

I ran across something that Peter London said that really struck me, "Nature is not a noun. Nature is a verb, and the action that it engages in is creating. We see a tree, but nature is in the act of treeing. The same is true of mountains, meadows, roses, flamingoes, smelts, stars, and  summers. The dance of genesis may at times be slow, its steps subtle, but dance it is." What a wonderful idea. We can all be verbs rather than nouns. I'd love to think about my life as a dance.

The top painting was from a sketch in the yard. The bottom is, of course, the back and has a ghost spiral.
I am sure there will be more spirals, but not yet.

Yard Debris Spiral

The descriptive titles are getting longer. I like the idea of creating something in the yard, talking to it and then working from it. The spiral is here, the plants, and in the distance, water. Memory and feeling are starting to be evident in the work but it is not alive enough yet.

Debris Spiral

Mom, this one's for you. I really think it applies. Life, Death, Eternity.

Debris Too

A Debris monster is taking over the yard. As you can see it has a life of its own. Keeping the ground clear of all the floating stuff takes unrelenting effort. It comes down from trees, washes up from the river, and appears in a multitude of ways.

As you know, I started talking to the yard and as we converse I am sometimes focused on the numerous bits laying on the ground. Abstraction has its start there. Just look down. Debris, or entropy, is a universal law. So maybe is abstraction.

New Conversation

Mary has left. I need to shift the work. It has felt a little hollow at times these last few days. Instead, today I decided to have a chat with the spiral and debris in the back yard and to funnel my responses onto the paper. The water is black and the spiral is visible in pink on the left. It felt great and maybe the start of a new series.