LIGHTNESS IS LIFE

a truck load of wood gathered while I was inside writing

Today begins the blogathon I am reluctant to set in motion. I find I would rather sleep, would rather read, would rather make some coffee, would rather feed the cat, would rather watch a movie, would rather just about anything. I find myself in avoidance behavior like I do given an assignment. Time to get out the checkbook and pay bills, I start looking for something else to do. Went to take a nap a little bit ago, because considering the assignment, I wanted to sleep. We are to get a "prompt" daily. Today's prompt was six essay questions. I felt like I was facing a final exam with six questions to answer in three hours. GO.

melvin and gail saw the log

 

First question: Why do I exist? Only one brief answer enters my mind. Sexual intercourse. I take existence to mean with a physical body in a physical dimension. That's why I exist. A 21 year old guy and 19 year old girl doing what they're supposed to do, got married and had a baby. They were conforming, not long out of conformity training.

 

done for the day

 

Second question: What is my purpose on earth? To live my life. That's all I know.

melvin

 

Third question: What is the why behind my creative work? Necessity. It's like a beagle is bred to chase rabbits and finds its fulfillment chasing rabbits. Art has been the only subject of my interest since first memories. I suspect very strongly many past lives an artist. Never had an art class. It was like I already knew how when I started. The high school I went to had an art class, but looking in the doorway at what they were doing, it looked to me like a bunch of silly shit and I didn't want to do silly shit. Growing up I was told "take business administration courses, that's the only way you're gonna make money." I hated business administration class. Failed it because I hated it so much. All the adults in my life were telling me to make money. Money was the only purpose I was given while growing up for a reason to live. Then there was church making adult life look like the worst existence possible. Go to church all the time, never drink, suppress sex, believe stuff nobody in their right mind can fall for, and live in guilt calling it God's will. Parents, public school, church and military all taught the same thing: conform and make money. Forget art, it doesn't make money. All my training to the time I entered college after doing military first was make more money. Ya gotta make money. The kind of work that paid best was the kind that took over your life. I was coming into discovering my life my own and did not want to give it away to making money. When I flunked business administration, I settled with myself that I will never make money. I'll work low paying jobs and live on little. Low paying work does not require that I BE my job. No status, no problem.

gail

 

Fourth question: What do I want to be remembered for? I suspect I'll be remembered for tuning the people of Alleghany County to their own musical heritage they'd largely forgotten. Had a music store for four years that sold mountain music cds and a radio show for seven years on the local AM station of local and regional music. Helped put together a 4-cd set of musicians from the county. Gave my collection of regional music to the library. Have written some articles for Old-Time Herald magazine concerning local musicians, the most recent a fiddler named Howard Joines. Have worked with people doing field recordings and have done a few. My goal was to set in motion an appreciation that would take a life of its own, which it has done. I paint portraits of local musicians.  I'm known by the mountain people as somebody who came in from the outside and appreciated their way of life and who they are. I'll be remembered by some an asshole and by some a cool dude. How I'm remembered has never entered my mind before today. I have a name for being an artist, so that's probably the first way I'll be remembered. I don't even like to think about post-death, except for the tunnel of light and angels leading the way. The question was what I want to be remembered for. What I'd want would be something like, was good to animals. Anything that happens after the moment of my mortal frame's last breath, I care nothing about, except for my own celestial experience. Some will cry as I have cried in the past losing friends, and some will be glad, as I have been in the past. It's not my concern.
 

justin

 

Fifth question: Three or more words why I create art. Art is fun.
 

melvin, gail, justin

 

Sixth question: A tshirt message about my purpose or mission creating art. LIGHTNESS IS LIFE.

 

justin, melvin, gail

 

That wasn't so hateful. Turned out to be fun by the end. I never ask myself why I exist. Conception happens. Writing the daily blog for almost five years, it has become my daily purpose. Just the writing is the purpose. I don't want to write or make any kind of art with an agenda, attempting to convince somebody of something. I am the anti-commercial. I'm self-taught. Everything I do is the first time. That's what I like about art. Every time is the first time. My friends who hunt speak of hunting the same way. One says hunting is better than sex, because hunting is the first time every time and sex is the same thing over and over. The chrysanthemum is my flower, the late bloomer. This lifetime is a learning lifetime. Learning has been number one since my beginning. In the later part of the life, I'm weaving together what I've learned into my art expressions.

 

 

down south

 

 

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IN PRAISE OF ROB COPELAND'S PHOTOGRAPHY

 

 

 

 

Above is a photo made today of my friend Sheena. My new facebook friend Rob Copeland in NYC has been making some extraordinarily beautiful photographs of reflections in car glass, car hoods and tops that make a curved or distorted reverse image of a building or two or three that are also in the frame. Rob's pictures have a dimension that moves my heart when I see them. Gary Winogrand's images and Joel Meyerowitz's images excite my heart in the same way Rob Copeland's do. I say excite my heart because that's where I feel the sensation when I see a large percentage of his images. Some of them are breath-taking, literally. They cause an inspiration, an in-breath, an inhalation, the sudden intake of air when I feel awe. He puts pictures on facebook every day, a touch that makes my facebook pages all the more fun to look at. Rob has opened a new dimension for me. I see reflections everywhere now. They've always been there and I've always missed them, with some exceptions, the ones that jump in my face. I walk through parking lots looking at the sky and clouds on windshields, trees, signs, wires. In a world of mundane traffic, pavement, brick, cinderblock and glass, the occasional appearance of a reflection on the glass of a car passing in the other lane, the sky and clouds rolling across the glass. It is not exaggeration to say noticing reflections has added a new dimension to my world. I'm not taking a lot of pictures of them. I don't want to seem like I'm copying Rob. I send him a reflection photo I find from time to time calling them "hillbilly reflections," for the fun there is in it.  

 

 

 

 

 

This is Sheena's man, Gail, with his pickup. I was looking for a way to get his reflection in the glass, but couldn't find it for the mirror, which worked good second best. I started sending Rob what I thought comic reflections, like trash on a dashboard reflected inside the windshield on the highway. Then this picture of Sheena happened. I wasn't thinking it a Sheena portrait at the moment. I saw the reflection and thought of Rob, Sheena walked into the V-slot to put something in the back seat. That she happened to be there when I saw the reflection in the glass made it a million times better. I'd not yet made a photo of Sheena that I think of as a nice portrait of her, how she looks as I know her. I think this is my Sheena portrait. She is seen through the hinged-side opening of the open back door, her brother Justin's four-door pickup. Reflected in the glass is the rigging above the back of the pickup for hauling ladders. It is one of my favorite photographs of all I've made. It was a moment in the new dimension Rob has opened for me. Standing in the same place I snapped the Sheena picture, to the right Gail was talking with his brother on the cell phone. I don't have any pictures of Gail. He was standing beside the truck's glass reflections at a moment I was focused on reflections to send to Rob. I'm happy with this one as my Gail portrait. Gail is my definition of a good man, all the way around. Good hunter, good archer, good people. The same can be said for his brother Ronnie. I'm grateful to God for the good care Gail gives Sheena.

 

 

 

 

 

This was the scene on Gail's pickup's back glass. It's a decal of a multi-pointer buck in the middle of the glass. It's another hillbilly reflection I made for Rob's amusement. From cityscape to landscape. The cityscape makes some exquisite reflection photographs. This new dimension I've stepped into has brought in moments of found art that are specific to place, time and point of view. Every time I see a reflection now, it's like a spontaneous piece of art. I'm thinking of reflections I see as, themselves, art. Once noticed, incredibly beautiful art. Since Rob has brought reflections to my visual awareness, I look for them in movies. When I notice a reflection, I also see that the director and the photographer, both, missed a moment of visual opportunity. A moment of just seeing the reflection is a surprise moment of art, and they go as unnoticed as unwanted children. Every time I see a movie, now, I see reflections that could have added a great deal to the visual moment and nobody saw it. Reflections I see in the course of a day give my mundane world of traffic and town some visual surprises. Glass is everywhere in town. I'd never paid attention to the scenes on the windows. I've seen them, but had not appreciated them. Now they are like gems that pop up here and there. They give a bit of zing to my everyday world like anchovies in pizza.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here is the windshield of Sheena's car parked under a tree. It was the reflection that initially caught my eye. We were on the way to the softball game down the mountain at Austin off of Traphill Road. Justin and Gail were playing. They promised on the way there that they'd scorch the other team, and they did. Justin went in the house, I sat on the tailgate of the truck with camera looking at the clouds and the tops of the trees in relation to each other. I've noticed that the outlines of trees are similar to the outlines of clouds. Both are created by water flow. I was looking for something interesting in the trees in relation to the clouds. Got a couple of pictures that were neither here nor there. Just looking around, seeing what I could see, mostly focused on clouds. It was a beautiful day for clouds. Big floating cotton balls pulled into every kind of configuration. It was a clear day sky with clouds floating across the blue. The trees and clouds were nice, but only for one picture. I sat looking at beautiful fields of goldenrod with late afternoon sun on them. I looked over at Sheena's car under the tree and saw the windshield. I hopped to the ground and made a few pics of the glass. Also got one of the side glass with two contrails in the sky making a white V on blue. By the time you figure out what the white lines are, it's too late. It's a joke that took too long in the telling. By the time you figure it out, it wasn't worth the effort.

 

 

 

 

It was after seeing the glass on Sheena's car that I went back to where the two pickups were parked. The back door was open on Justin's truck, I saw the image of the ladder rack in the glass, stepped up to get a look at it and Sheena appeared. It was a magic moment. It was the tree on the car windshield that set me off. I was thinking a hillbilly reflection for Rob, a tree on the glass. That was the inspiration. I saw it comic, fun, a kind of in-joke. Then the moment happened with Sheena and it felt like I'd been touched by the Divine fingertip. I thanked Rob in spirit for a fantastic moment, my portrait of Sheena. We all packed into the truck with as big a back seat as a big car, Seth, 7, going with us. At the ball game, Seth had his exercise running to find a foul ball that went over the fence on either side. The homeruns that went over the fence into the woods were hopeless to try to find that late in the day. This is Justin in the picture below, the split-second after he dropped the bat to run for first. It was a base hit. That's Gail heading out from first for second. They truly scorched the other team. 21-6. Sheena and I sat on the aluminum bleacher and talked through the course of the game. Every once in awhile, one of us would ask, Who's ahead? I valued having the time with Sheena, just us, talking about whatever. We've known each other all her life. Both Justin and Gail hit home runs over the fence. We kept an eye on Seth who spent the whole time running. He'll make a good soccer player.

 

To check out some of Rob's photographs:

 http://robcopelandphotography.blogspot.com 

 

 just a click away

 

 

 

all photos by tj worthington

 

 

 

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