The Cloak Wants to be Performed

This is the Cloak I began early this year, at that time I was calling it "Cape."  I went to an artist's residency in Mexico with the intention of making a fiber cocoon, in which to perform my embodiment process.  What I ended up making was a wearable piece that must be performed to fulfill its purpose, as the testimony that it is.

As of now I have publicly perfomed the Cloak three times.  It could be said the Cloak has performed itself through me.

Here is the latest performance, done with a very small group in Egg Harbor, WI.  The final piece lasted over 2 hours.

A few video segments...

In this segment I explain how the Cloak came to be...

Visit my YOUTUBE channel here 

Before that performance I did a livestream performance with the Cloak, which involved a reading of "The Ship of Skeletons."

And finally, the first performance, which took place in Mexico, at the Zocalo in Puebla. 

 

It has become evident to me that the Cloak is a garment of initiation, and being an initiatic process, the Cloak is changing as I change.  The entire experience is metamorphic, being documented as a living testimony to the experience of becoming through change in the time and the world I live in.

More information about the residency ARQUETOPIA

                                     

The Female Center

I sometimes hear voices.  I kept pretty quiet about that my entire life, because, well, I was afraid of being judged by minds that do not understand such things.  This has been a month of letting go of fears... so that one's gone too.

In the early morning hours I sometimes hear a voice, telling me one thing at a time, helping me understand. It's always been a fatherly voice, until yesterday.  Yesterday the voice was female. It told me to Enter. 

The words were "Put yourself inside of me."  (If you immediately thought about sex read the next paragraph.  If not, you can skip it.)

The sexuality of the phrase, while undeniable, could easily become a distraction from the larger lesson of the words.  Making female power centered on sex is a way of taking away female power, by limiting it to one dimension of human activity.  If we as a culture had a healthy relationship with feminine power, then the relationship between sexuality and all the other forces that drive us as humans would exist in harmony.

I reflected on the words I had heard, "Put yourself inside of me" until I finally decided to paint.

My first interpretation of the voice was that of the earth, the mother, the female.

Fire inside, fire in the center.  What to enter?  The Center.  It is in the entering that the understanding begins to unfold, through the feeling, through the energy, through the very act of entering.

We are at a time in history when we have so much to look back on and sift through.  Books and knowledge excite me, offering so many paths of thought and exploration for the mind.  But, in the end, I have to get out of my head for the clarity I need.  The clarity that is needed for peace comes from calling my ancestors and finding my center.  It comes from a place that cannot be defined with words.  

The knowing that comes from the mind and the knowing that comes from the heart's center do not need to be in competition.   Coexisting, they work together, for we are in the world, as well as the spirit, at this time.  This is the conflict I see around me, that of opposing poles.  How does one shift that magnetic push of opposition into an alignment?   By entering the center, where the forces no longer push or pull.  Rather than split the atom, enter it.

What my ancestors and spirit are telling me is to release fear.  This happens by facing fears, not suppressing them or pushing them away.  Looking at fear and then letting it go is the way through the anxiety of our time.  It leads to a centered calm.  Everything must change, in a profound and all encompassing way.  That change is happening, and in order to adjust to the change, a strong and centered female energy is needed.  And this is an energy that is misunderstood in a patriarchal world, where equality is often sought on male terms, and feminine power is still confined by those very terms. 

The imbalance has been focused on male, light, linear thought, hierarchy and force.  We are witnessing its final stages.   It cannot be tamed, let alone fought , with more of its own .  A receptive, dark, female energy encircles it and tames it, not with force but with unimaginable power.  This happens on every level of human activity, from the most intimate to the most public, through personal relationships to political struggles.  All we need to do is look to nature and spirit to bring our human world back into balance.  Starting with, but not stopping at, ourselves.

Female is reception.  It is Yin.  It is the stillness in the center of the storm.   It is the heat from the center of the earth.  

That is where I enter.  

i am usha

The Dark. A natural and essential part of our existence.  Not evil.  Not inferior.  Deep.  Forceful.

Darkness is intense,  and so widely misunderstood.  Who has not used the word "darkness" to describe something ominous and threatening; when in truth it is simply the unknown.  It takes a brave deconstruction, followed by an honest reconstruction, of language, culture and history to fully understand what darkness truly is.  It takes conquering the fear of the unknown.

One thing I have had to admit to myself, in these times, is my own reluctance to go deep and wide.  To be honest with myself and to keep Looking.  Especially when it is hard to look, when what I see before me is greed and unimaginable cruelty.  The Horror.  Looking at the world with my eyes wide open and my heart wide open feels like a punch in the chest, leaving me breathless.  I begin the year 2017 with the humble realization that I, too, have been hiding from my own intense darkness. 

What I learned as a child:

What one sees in the dark will not be believed.  

Turn on a light and it disappears.  

What I learned as an adult:

Leave the seeds of your own imagination and intuition in the light of the bright sun. 

They will shrivel and die.  

For they need the cool damp soil, the long dark nights and rain.

Finally, I not only understand darkness; I thrive in it. I am learning to see in it.  I need to go into darkness to fully understand myself and the world.  There I have found a deep connection with my ancestors.  My ancestors are my connection with the unwritten past that I carry within, making them the seeds of compassion for myself and all life.  

In the light of day we learn we are all one in the world, and we reach out to the sun.  In the darkness we learn we are all one in the universe, and we germinate.  

Darkness is where seeds germinate.

My journey into this acceptance takes me into the mythology of my patrilineal ancestry and my Sanskrit name, Usha.  Let me be clear - India is more than the land of chai tea and asanas, colorful goddess memes about enlightenment and little brown men in tree poses.   That is the surface of India, the travel brochure ad, the guru's full page ad.  I love my yoga classes and I appreciate the West's need for something to ease the imbalance in its own culture.  I struggle at how often that leads to a narrow vision, the appropriation of only a slice of a monumentally complex culture, existing now in a country devastated and transformed by Neocolonialism.  There are certainly many Westerners who consciously address this problem.  And I respect the complexity of American life, being a part of it while I sometimes bristle at it.  I have driven home frustrated from at least a few yoga classes, when, chatting after class, I have tried to explain my own experience of India.  I lack the words as much as the culture I live in lacks the understanding.  It is an impasse that has led me to create a world of art surrounding this name, Usha, and all it represents.  You cannot embrace the shiny surface of India without swallowing the darkness that is as much hers.  And this goes for all of spirituality, all of nature, all of this existence.

Usha is also a character I have worked on in several stories.  Often intensely personal work,  I seldom felt comfortable having my stories be public.  They are stories that reflect my most personal struggles, my relationship with my Indian father, my outsider status, my stubborn pride over an identity I fail to fully understand.  Usha has been a protagonist in a private monologue.  She journeys into darkness, giving me the courage to reveal these stories and the imagination to create new ones.  In the dimming light of the Empire's Lies I feel the time has come.

 I am one of many.

Sometime in the 70's:  a day in the life of Usha.  

"I am Usha" is not about history and a retelling of ancient myths.  There are piles of books for that.  It is my personal discovery of an unknown lineage through the journey of visionary art making.  It is my own solitary conversation with my ancestors when I wear my Sanskrit name.  It is a change that occurs when you see your present self through the eyes of your cellular memory.   It is more than a name, and more than an exploration of culture; in the end it is a search for meaning in the abyss.  Implicit in the search is the release of old norms of thinking, a rejection of dogma, opinions and assumptions.  What replaces these untruths does not reveal itself immediately and an uncomfortable darkness descends.  Uncomfortable because it is the unknown, the one thing feared so deeply.  But Darkness and Unknowing have become my closest confidants in this language of art I have developed in a lifetime.

"I am Usha" is a journey into the mysterious understanding of the necessities of darkness that ultimately leads to the light of communicating and connecting with the world.  Each of these cannot exist without the other, making me realize "I am Usha" is my way of joining the divided parts of myself as a mirror to the divided world I live in.  It is my hope that this creative vision quest will unite past and present, illustrating the illuminating potential of darkness.  In the end this is all I ask of my art.  

Note: all paintings are my own, painted between 1994-1997.

Manifesto of a Solitary Artist in the Age of Unenlightenment

A Confession, a Conclusion, a Manifesto….

Otherwise titled, Five Years in the Journey of a Artist in the Age of Unenlightenment

Otherwise titled… Onward!

Five years ago I sat a table with a small group of friends and revealed to them my decision to step away from the world.  I don’t think I said “drop out” because I knew I had to remain attached enough to put food on my table and pay the rent.  And I wanted to try, for once, to put 100% of my effort into surviving financially as an artist.  But, I explained, I don’t believe in it anymore… the BIG LIE, that I have to make my money this way (at the time I operated a successful tourist shop in Fish Creek, WI)  and all the little lies that I swallow in order to make that happen.  I moved out of the city and into this little doublewide in the woods and started making my exit…

Within a year my “step away” was a giant leap into the unknown and uncertainty of the path less traveled.  I closed my shop, and I sold or gave away most everything that remained.  I kept what I needed to work from home as a eco-conscious artist, working with repurposed materials and selling in a few local galleries and online.   It was a dramatic change of lifestyle and work and income.   

It didn’t take long before the little savings I had was gone.  The simple choice of whether to drive to town depended as much on gas money as the environmental consequences.  I had cornered myself into a life of quiet solitary work (which I wanted) and financial precariousness (much more than I expected)  and the stress of trying to succeed at something in these circumstances.  

I am not writing this to tell you about reducing trips to the dump and the pump.  There are plenty of resources on the internet if you want to learn about that.  I’m sure there are people doing a better job than I am.  What I want to share is the psychological impact this leap had on me and my life, my relationships and, in the end, my definition of self.  What i didn’t realize, while revealing my decision at that table five years ago, was dropping out of the system would mean emptying my life of the activity and thought that filled every work day.  And it would be scary to be that empty.

We are all born into a culture and we are a part of that culture.  And that culture is a part of us.  As many people already realize, in a racist culture, the members, even when they are abhorrent to the IDEA of racism, still have elements of it in them.  That is true for every distinguishing feature of the culture you exist in.  As we are in the universe and the universe is in us, WE ARE IN THE CULTURE AND THE CULTURE IS IN US.  And this culture we live in, this American Dream, it is a state of heightened consumerism.  Everything we do is somehow measured and compared, every breath, every step is broken apart into quantitative measurements.  We lay prostrate to the system waiting for the final numbers of our worth.   When you’re not productive in the system, you are invisible.  You are certainly not a success.  

That was the hard part… 

We not only consume products of the system, we are the products and the consumers and the means of production.  Even if all you are producing is another version of the lie.  Stepping away means unraveling oneself from these roles, and refusing to lie to yourself.  When you start to really separate yourself from the culture you live in there is a dangerous thing that happens, you lose your sense of self.  This is evident when you are a solitary and, for the most part, unrecognized artist.  Being a solitary and unrecognized artist had always made it possible for me to be true to myself.  I have always been free of the pressures of academia and fashion and trends, whether intellectual or aesthetic. But here I was taking a leap of faith that I could survive financially as an artist and still retain my artistic freedom. I had no idea what a psychologically dangerous pit I was falling into.  

I didn’t expect the loss of my connection to this world I was raised in and lived in to be so difficult.  I thought I had already let it go.  I had rejected Capitalism and Consumer Culture and I had embraced Simple Living.  At first I was elated to be free and told friends how great it felt.  Fairly soon after the initial elation I had a health crisis that was nearly debilitating.  My entire body was covered in a rash, a terribly itchy uncomfortable rash that lasted almost two years.  During this time I buried myself in work and distanced myself from friends.  I established strong boundaries, many of which were healthy and necessary, but for awhile I built a wall around myself.  I spent hours in solitude and lived a quasi hermit’s life and had a love/hate relationship with my own existence.  (I need to add I did this with a caring partner on a similar path)  Without the distractions of the world and work I had once buried myself in, I found new distractions, everything from Netflix series about aliens to the strange new world of social media marketing.   I was painfully aware of the emptiness of these new distractions.  The biggest distraction was still so firmly rooted in me I didn’t see it for another couple of years, the addiction to work, productiveness and the dream of success.  But, despite how hard I worked, I was not all that successful, just scraping by.

I started feeling frustrated and lost.  I felt a range of emotions from hopelessness to jealousy.  As much as my rational brain told me otherwise, my feelings told me I was a victim.  I experienced mild depression and that was new for me, and scary.  I mentally chastised myself for every missed opportunity in life, leading me to a place of emptiness.  I felt like a failure and still, at this point, did not realize the emptiness I felt was just the temporary emptiness that results when you empty your life of the things that no longer fulfill you.  

  

That depression grew into discontent and longing.  I literally drove and walked all over Door County (and the state of Wisconsin) wishing I had a different life.  Every house, farm or commercial building that was for sale could take me on an imaginary journey into some dream existence… sometimes lasting days or weeks.  

Sometimes, while driving around and looking at old farms and shops for sale, I saw myself through the watcher’s gaze and I saw the desperation in this search.  I have no money in the bank.  I knew this search would have to stop.  I could see it for what it was, another attempt to validate myself.  In the sheer transparency of my desperation I finally saw it, what I was beating myself up about, what i was perceiving as failure, what I was desperately trying to fill.  The Void. 

And then came the real grieving.  The tears.  That process that may look like the worst to someone looking in, but is really the best.  The new me that emerged from all this pain of letting go reconnected with my deeper self.  All the parts of me that had never fit into this culture flooded back into my consciousness, orphans from unfinished chapters in the life of a outsider.  I was successfully making it through my difficult journey.  The tears, which now I see to be the true release, freed me from the guilt of perceived failure and the fear of a perceived lack of belonging and the longing for something that I didn’t need.

I had learned what I needed most to learn, that the simple concept of consumption isn’t just about buying and selling; those are simply the forms that dominate our economy. They overshadow the way in which the mentality of consumption destroys our spirit and our humanity.  I think it was a dramatic lesson for me only because as a solitary artist and social outsider my life had been kidnapped by the concept of my art as a product and my purpose as a producer.  In this new cottage industry economy it is easy to fall into that trap.  I confused my artistic journey with the journey of the many “makers” in this new economy, but that is not who I am.   Just as I had to come to terms with the realization that i do not fit into the world of academia, nor into the commercial art world, I am not a “maker” in this new economy, one which pushes artists to be slickly marketed production machines.  (Note there are many people who fulfill the role of "maker' and remain true to their artisan values and I am not referring to them.  Being a new field, it is pursued with passion by many but is also manipulated by larger forces.)  What I finally awakened to is the realization that my journey as an artist has to be absolutely authentic and tireless, and like no other journey that has ever come before me.  Success, whether measured by money, production, or social acceptance, should have no role in the motivation of the artist.  The only success is to be alive and to continue to create something for the world that reflects ones true existence in the world.  There are no models or templates or guidebooks, only hard work and intuition.  I have no intention to stop working.  But my work no longer depends on the narrow definitions of “productivity” and worldly success.  I am working even harder, because I have come to realize it is my soul’s work.  

I have something new to bring with me for the steps and leaps ahead.  A sense of peace like none I’ve ever experienced cropped up in the emptiness left my my “dropping out.”  The only thing I feel I need to fill the space with is love and the work of love, which is different for every person.  We are all here fulfilling an individual path that can’t be separated from the whole of the paths, the movement of the world and its beings.  All each of us needs to do is answer that for ourselves, not letting any one person or system or culture tell us what that is.  What an energizing truth.  It fills us with the energy we need to do the work that must be done.  We need to be in service to bring forth love rather than drain love from the world.  Because this is where the REAL WORK begins.

I will try hard to never forget how awful the rashes, the anger and angst and depression felt each time I am tempted by distractions, lulled into sleep or seduced by false dreams of “success”.  Because I am in the culture and cannot drop out.  That is the lesson.  I have been in it all along and now I feel whole enough to be in it without being seduced or sickened.  I envision myself walking through it with my head held up and my back straight and my eyes wide open, in a direction that I have never headed before.  As the true artist I have always been.  

That is my Manifesto.  An artist in the Age of Unenlightenment.

Visionary Painting

Visionary Painting is a very broad term that many people claim.  In my opinion they are all valid but they are all not the same.
I am not borrowing other's philosophies that speak to me and making illustrative collages with known images in order to communicate my cause.  This is fine, it is a form of communication and it can spread ideas. There's nothing wrong with it, it's just not what I do.
I am not envisioning an ideal world and painting it.  This is a valid process and can stimulate awareness and even change, but... not what I do.
I am not looking at the world outside of me and painting my vision of it, art like this can be very beautiful and stirring, but it's not what I do.

What I do is something different.  I am not the only one, but I think we're not very mass-market popular.  We are not commerce driven because this work isn't pretty and it's a hard sell.  We are not academic because we rely on our intuition and mysterious processes much more than our intellect.   We sometimes don't mirror the accepted academic stance on issues, we sometimes do. Sometimes I have no idea where we fit, but I know it when I see it.  We do our work in private, making sense of the world by listening to the muse of the spirit world giving us messages that are difficult to decipher. We "put them out there" when we deem them ready.  I have had to remind myself over and over again not to comprimise this, even if I never get recognition, attention or money for what I paint.  When I remember that, I am rewarded greatly by the process itself.   

So, why share it at all?  I guess I just get pretty excited about it.  I feel like a consciousness talks to me when I'm painting and I get very enthusiastic about that.   It feels like a wider and more expansive consciousness that I have in other areas of life.  So it's sometimes hard to understand completely, especially when I first hear it.  It's a bit like dreaming while awake.  I want others to look and maybe see it, maybe not.  At this point 90% or more  of you may be dismissing me as delusional, flaky or both.  But I'm ok, I function as well as most.  I am not convinced my thoughts are always clear or realistic, but they are not any more delusional that anyone elses belief systems.  (in my humble opinion)

I actually feel these "conversations" help me function better.  But only when I keep them balanced wth the rest of my existence.

When I was a very young child I dreamt I was on a boat, heading to a big destination with my family.    I think we were moving our residence.  During the trip a psychotic doctor was turning everyone into skeletons.  I hid and was able to escape, but I was terrified.  The rest of my family were skeletons.  I was torn between trying to save them and staying hidden.  I had no idea how to save them.   I didn't want to be a skeleton.  I woke up with the dilemma unresolved, a fearful wakening in the middle of the night.  I will never forget it.  

This symbolism is the subject of this painting and of a solo show I have scheduled for a year from now.  (The show is at UW-Fox Valley in Menasha, WI)  I have decided to name the show "Usha" after my imaginary alter-ego I developed when I learned my Hindi name.  

Usha is a character who resolves issues for me through stories.  They are stories I have never shared publicly, but they mean a great deal to me.  Literary World-wise they are not ready, well-written or completely resolved enough to publish, in my opinion.  But they really help me think...

This particular painting finds water and oil interacting.  The skeleton is from my dream, and my skeleton drips oils from all it's limbs.  I don't yet know where Usha fits into this, but I know she will.  She is coming out of the many layers, like the dresses I make.  She is hiding behind the ancestors, she is flowing in the water.  She wants to save the skeletons but she is afraid.  It just takes time.  For now there is water and it runs through the skeletons mouth, trying to bring it back to life, but it seeps through and waters the wheels of a great and powerful machinery.  The thing is that the water never stops flowing, even after the machines have stopped.

The ancestors keep watch.  They are witnesses to it all, but they cannot be heard by most.  What is it they want to say?  Can we listen?

I believe Usha will appear and she will help me once again understand my role.  It might be in a dream.  It might be a story that comes to me.  It might be the next time I am painting this.  I hope I have the answer soon, because I feel helpless and afraid sometimes, not knowing how to act and not react to the times and events we are all living through. 

I feel that I know more than I knew before I had the vision, but I certainly don't have any answers.  Just feelings, images and more questions.

Ancestors - India

To speak of Ancestors of to speak of the past in its human form.   

Dad leaving India

An Ancestor Cape I finished this week

All my life I’ve thought about India.  Before I was born my father left on a ship.  It set his life on a course that took him further and further away from his birthplace.  And all my life, even before I knew it, I have been drawing and painting, and crafting a path back.  

Miniature Painting: The Victory of Ali Quli Khan on the river Gomti-Akbarnama 

When I was a very small child I drew meticulous miniature drawings, with battle scenes and leafy trees, looking like something out of the Mughal Empire, without the skilled hand of a Court Painter.  It was like that all through my childhood, sometimes just a shape or a pattern of curves, or a color palette, would bring a little India back into my present day life.  When I began to recognize this it seemed a bit like magic, as if the voices of the past were whispering in my ear.  Very possibly the books about India that were scattered throughout the house, as well as a family trip right after my tenth birthday had more to do with these visual tendencies; either way my interest in Ancestors was sparked.  By the time I was a graduate student in the arts I focused a great deal of study on Indian history and art, even taking a Hindi summer course with UWMadison’s own Virendra Ji, where I flailed through the intensive study of a language that felt surprisingly foreign to me. 

I find it ironic now, reflecting on my personal quest in the nineties, when I was so focused on India Past.  Simultaneously millions of young Indians were pursuing new careers, moving to cities like Chennai and Mumbai, and looking towards a American ideal of the self made man as a new way of seeing themselves and their futures.  While they were casting away Old India I was catching it in my net and spreading it out on notebooks and canvases, creating a visual incantation of a past I had so little connection to, apart from the blood in my veins.  What we were all doing was putting holes in the walls that blocked out the light of our imaginations.  For me the light filtered bits of a past where I imagined I belonged, and for the millions of young Indians at the end of the 20th century,  a yet to be imagined future.  I wonder now if we had torn down the wall completely would we have found each other standing hesitantly on the other side?

My painting: Mughal's Climb 1996 

At the time, focused on All Things Indian, I was forging a path back through the terrain of weeds and heavy brush that had grown in my father’s footsteps.  He had left it all behind a generation earlier and my idealistic quest for cultural belonging both amused and annoyed him.  I was poking holes in the veneer of Being an American - something he had worked so hard and long to afford us.  But right under the surface of the veneer was a richer history that my restless fingers picked away at.  Of course the holes I created were small and only offered a tiny glimpse of the full picture.  They were almost harmless, like tiny moth holes in a wool sweater.  No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t unravel the mystery of my own past enough to understand my place in the present.  In Virendra’s Hindi class I realized I had less in common with the Indian kids than the Caucasians.  But the reality, that I belonged to neither gnawed at me enough to make me continue picking and poking, until my whole world looked like Swiss Cheese.

Layered Print, one of many I made in the 90's

With all those holes in my psyche it was time to start the process of REPAIR.  And so began a lifetime cycle of tear and repair , that has revealed to me who I am as much as it has made me.  

The Journey

It's one of many overused phrases in our culture, that, once full of possibility, have become slogans that sell everything. (especially cars)  But... nevertheless... I have to start this post with these words:

It is not the destination.

It IS the Journey.

Here I am.  50 years old.  Still figuring out what painting means to me.  Well, not in every sense.  Not in the deep down in my gut way, the way it has pulled me deep down into my interior... in that sense I've always known.  But understanding the relationship between me and painting and the world, that's another story.

I finished another painting this morning.  I thought it was finished a few days ago, but I was wrong.  That happens a lot. 

Here's what it looked like two days ago:

Not too different, but not quite right.  Quite right is a very understated emotional moment when I have pulled out everything the painting is able to give me.  I just know it, if I'm paying attention.  Paying attention to what?  Paying attention to the painting, while equally paying attention to my gut. By that I mean a feeling deep inside.  A deep feeling that is truthful, not "nice" not "pretty" not what I necessarily "want" to hear.  

I believe Truth is something you feel.  It's a heavy and quiet feeling that slows down my breathing and centers me.  I know it and I trust it.  The more I practice this the more I have no need to react to anyone else's "truth" and, therefore, I find it easier to be in the world without being swallowed up by the world.

This is why I paint.

I looked back at the photos I took of this painting in it's many stages of development.  As it evolved it had many looks, and some are probably more appealing visually that the final product.  Luckily for me I have no longer set my sights on painting for profit.  I'm not worried about what other people want, what would be prettier, more pleasing and more trendy.  What I'm worried about is pulling something out of a painting. Something that is inside of me, something that is in the air around me. Something in between me and all the forces outside of this body and mind I reside in.

One

This is how it started.  A grid and a wall and couple of cats and a man.  He's reaching for a tree.  And that tree, reaching out of the ground, reaching, like the man.  And walls, rooms, spaces... keeping everything separate and trapped and safe.  And a ceiling that has stopped the tree from reaching any further.  It might look pretty, but it's got to be resolved, because I know there's a problem that needs to be solved, a question to answer.

Two

How I get to that answer is to just keep going.  In the beginning I just let myself act on intuition.  To look, respond, look again and respond again.  And on and on again.  I'm in this state of consciousness that is everything but literal, linear and verbal.  I can look back on it and tell you what I did (in this case I defined what I was seeing with black lines)  but at the time I probably couldn't explain it.  Just doing.  With paint

Three

By day three I realize there's something bigger than all the little parts.  I try to pull that out, with shadows.  At this point I thought it might be figure, just the head and shoulders.  A larger version of the little man, keeping everything else contained within itself.  The grid has become an animate living thing, which still has elements of the grid inside of itself.

Four

And then that being, be it a man, a woman, god, mind... whatever that was it has been swallowed up by the parts again, but this time the grid has become an organic web.  This was a really pretty part of the journey.  I wish I had taken a better photo.  I think in the future I will set up a good camera with a tripod and be ready to capture these stages in a good high res file... just in case I want to print it up really large and enjoy this part.  It is a beautiful place.  I liked being there.

Five

Day five, the image takes a radical turn.  No longer moving through the larger plane of the world, a path has been chosen.  The original character, the "subject" of this painting, has entered a new and protected space.  The space, inside of himself, is isolated but bright.  He's no longer swallowed up by the structure of the grid, nor the constant movement of the web.  He has a focus and stillness that was lost.  He is ready for transformation from within.

Six

In day six he begins to see the web that he is.  His own little cocoon begins to form a body and he is no longer a small little man but a little piece of something else that is just being born.  His body becomes part of a pattern, of something larger, something that is not yet itself.  I lost focus for a little while here and indulged in all the other busy things happening in the painting.  All the other busy things are just similar stories unfolding, all at once.  Every living thing that is born on this planet starts out like the first single cell organism to divide and, within itself, discover the endless nature of life.  I felt like I may have taken a giant step backwards, getting all caught up in simple forms when I thought I was already past that.  This part of the painting was a struggle.

Seven

The struggle is not to be avoided.  I seem to have to learn this over and over.  I want to curl up under a blanket and turn on Netflix and think about fake little worlds and dramas that are easy and entertaining. Metaphorically I have done this many times.  And literally.  But this painting keeps telling me this, "Come back,  attend.  The movement and the stillness and the looking and the thinking keep it going, keep it evolving and this is why you paint." 

That little red man wants to stop, he wants to hide and he wants to sleep, but he keeps reaching and he becomes a pattern on the wing of a butterfly.  The butterfly needs him to let go, in order to break out of its chrysalis.  It doesn't need him to hold on and be "strong."  It needs him to change with the other changes that are happening all around him.  Not to be frozen in time, not to be afraid, not to be lazy, stubborn or proud.  Not to follow and not to lead, just to evolve.

Eight

He doesn't let go, he is unable to.

Nine

And I realize that this story has been told, it has been pulled out of me.  The butterfly is frozen because the man could not let go and this is not a happy ending.  But it is not really an ending.  It a painting and it is one of many, I hope.  It is a lesson and I like lessons.  

And that is why I paint.

And our foolish man blows his trumpet triumphantly,
thinking he has won when he has actually killed the forming butterfly.
The butterfly is now a ghostly shell in which he is trapped. 

To be continued...

Sentient Speech

Today it occurs to me that the language of the Sentient Beings has to be poetry

Work in Progress:  "Chances of Drowning"

But I argue, "I'm not a poet."  

Well, I'm not a good one.

I don't know what to do.

"A Pigeon Post."

Just sit back

and listen

In progress: "A Hurricane Steed."

So I try it.

And I think, "Yes!  That's how they come to me!"

All I have to do is let the words come to me, just like the pictures.

"Secret Substitute Smell"

You're Still Talking

"City Jackal"

So I sit back.

Two words, that's all.

Just two words.

Over and over.

In Progress: "Fare Well"

Thank You

Thank You

Thank You

A Cast of Characters

You have already been introduced to The Introvert... here in his traveling form.

The Sentient Beings are a cast of characters I have been developing for years, I guess I can say my entire life.  They are all coming to life, together!  I am introducing you to a few more today.

Meet Grandfather Hummingbird

Grandfather's hummingbird, like the write E.B. White, has a conflict of interests.  "I get up every morning determined to both change the world and have a hell of a good time.  Sometimes this makes planning my day difficult." (quote by White)

White knew some really interesting Sentient Beings himself, I hope Grandfather Hummingbird can do them justice.

The Snake Spirit appears in many forms, here are two: The Anhinga, also known as Snake Bird and the Winding Vine.

The Snake Spirit is a misunderstood character, but the Introverts know his true intent, because Introverts pay attention to the little things and are never swayed by a mob mentality.

Luna Bear dreams all day and runs through the forest at night.

Luna Bear is a dreamer.  He also has a fierce and protective nature with a gentle and nuturing spirit.  Spirit Bear sometimes fools people into thinking he's a scary beast, but he has to do that to protect the innocent ones who can't always protect themselves.

 Many fear what they don't understand.