PAINTING IN CYCLES

robert mangold

Every day I feel good about getting older unto old. It's the best part of my life. I have good people in my circle, love all around. I ran into Matt in the grocery store yesterday with his two kids. As we spoke, I forgot something and remarked I like the forgetfulness that goes with old age. I said I like blank mind. He said, "I'll look forward to that," in irony. I do enjoy that information falls out of my mind. I think of it as a groundhog hole. I'll be talking, or writing, and the next thought just falls down a groundhog hole. Gone. Writing, I can look at the previous sentence and bring it back, but talking, I have to ask, What did I just say? Answer usually comes back, I don't remember. This tells me how important what I have to say is. So what's the point talking? When the groundhog hole swallows a thought, oh well. All the better that it's gone. Whoever is listening isn't hearing, so why talk? Because I'm expected to talk. Never on a subject. Never. One runs the mouth while the other daydreams waiting their chance to talk, jumps in and starts talking while the other daydreams and waits for a chance to talk. I don't even encourage conversation anymore. Quips. Brief notations, letting off steam. Somebody has something to say, I'll listen, and I'll talk making it a point to come as close to saying nothing as I can think of at the moment. It's like I'm in a sitcom everywhere I go. We tend to talk in sitcom punchlines. Not tuned into that medium, it's difficult for me to talk like a sitcom. When I try, it sounds silly. Sounds silly on a sitcom. I've never held the sitcom with canned laughter as anything but the lowest form of entertainment. I'd rather watch underwater terrapin races. I used to try to talk frivolous sitcom talk, just to have somebody to talk with from time to time. Now, I'd rather have no one to talk with. I'd rather stay home and be quiet, enjoy quiet mind. Talk less: forget less. 

robert mangold

So much is changing within that I sometimes wonder if I'm not rounding the last turn in a running race, where the runner goes wide open and runs the feeling out of his legs. This cycle I'm in is so fulfilling it makes me wonder if I'm nearing the finish line. Yet, I tend more to see it as I've finally come to a place in the life where my heart is open and mind uncluttered, no desires, no wanting anything but a new book, now and then, and wanting to give the donkeys a comfortable and happy life, Caterpillar too. I want to be an attentive friend to my friends. I want my art expression to be fulfilling in the doing. I'm way past caring about attention as an artist, a reputation, shows, money. I don't want any of it. I stepped into that world some many years ago, but jumped out like the frog dropped into boiling water. Too much jealousy, envy, hierarchy, judgment, pretend. I'd rather my friends have my art than anybody else. I'm not driven enough to pursue art as business. I've stopped painting in the past every time art turned into business. I wasn't going there. Every time I started painting again, it was a completely new style, new subjects, new mind, new cycle. This cycle of doing single-color abstractions feels the best of any before. It's like everything I was doing before was learning art. Suddenly, I'm pursuing an interest that is the natural next thing. Natural for me. Natural because I've leaned toward abstraction all the way along, am in bliss at a museum surrounded by abstractions. A wonderful abstraction can take my breath more than much that is figurative, though exceptions abound. I think I've learned how to breathe life into a figurative painting. Now is the time to breathe life into abstractions. I did not hold abstraction as a goal I was consciously working toward, though am able to see in retrospect the super-conscious had been progressing in that direction. 

antoni tapies

Painting figuratively, I used in my mind abstract principles, whatever that means. Though I was painting a recognizable subject, I saw it abstractly. This series of abstractions came out of seemingly nowhere. One day I was messing around with some shapes, rectangles in rectangles, and saw something I'd like to try, using cardboard. It started as two colors, but the two colors killed the cardboard as an element. One color makes the cardboard the subject. I like that it is two planes that look like one with a light line and a dark line. I've seen so many styles of abstractions, that when I looked for something that could be my own, somebody else had already done it. Antoni Tapies turns me on about the most of any abstractionist I'm aware of. There are many I love, but Tapies has my full appreciation. The few of his I have laid eyes upon have pulled the breath right out of my open mouth. I especially remember one I saw at the Carlos museum on the Emory campus in Atlanta, largely black. A luminous black. I can gaze at Tapies paintings on google images and be in awe, but seeing one, face to face, is a very special moment in my life. Another, Robert Mangold, who makes a canvas of a beautiful color applied perfectly smoothly, and a pencil line in varieties of shapes, circles, rectangles, ovals in wonderful ways that are unique to the given piece. Recalling one I saw at I think it was the Stedelijk in Amsterdam, a canary yellow I'd never seen before. It was a big rectangle. The pencil line a rectangle where the left and right lines were not parallel and missed meeting by about an inch. At the Mint in Charlotte, I saw one in a pale olive, a square canvas with a pencil line of a circle. Where it started and met at the bottom missed by about an inch. It's that space in his art eye of that period where I find his "art," what van Gogh called It. I found a book of Mangold paintings and never tire of looking at the images. I never dreamed I would one day be making abstractions of one color. 

robert mangold

Of course, there was immediate concern I'm imitating Mangold. It's not imitating. Like I saw his art in the small gap where lines fail to meet, I see my art in the lines of light and shade made by the edges of the cardboard in relation to light source. I love giving light and shade a part in my "art." The first one I made using cardboard, I didn't see those lines of light and dark. Used two colors. The second one used two colors too. The lines of light and shadow are rendered absent. All one color, those lines around the cardboard are the life in the piece. This is to my eye. I don't anticipate someone else seeing this. Its why I'm telling it. The cardboard shape becomes the subject. I like that as the oil paint dries, it shrinks into the texture of its surface. Paint wet, the cardboard looks like the same surface as the plywood. Dry paint the ribs of the cardboard show; that it is cardboard is apparent, as I want it. Cardboard is so common it's like the most common. Yesterday at the dump I looked at the cardboard pile, surveying big pieces for something larger I might want to make in future. I love about cardboard that it is the most common thing in all our lives. We all know cardboard. I love the commonness of plywood too, especially scraps. I see influence of Mangold up front, which I don't care about because it's not like Mangold. I see Tapies influence and Motherwell influence. My way of making an abstraction is as new to me as it is to someone looking at it the first time. I'm looking for what I see influencing these new pieces I'm having a ball making. If I can make something that takes my breath like standing before a Tapies, I feel like I have touched art. With each one I'm making now, I feel that awe upon completion. I'm following that awe to see where it goes.   

antoni tapies

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GRUMPY OLD BASTARD REBEL WITH ATTITUDE

antoni tapies

This morning talking on the phone with my friend Carole, I was talking about how paranoid I've become about driving. An alarming number of people I know have been given tickets over the last year. I've not seen it in the past anything like it is now. The state has it set so you don't get out of a ticket for less than $200. The ticket may be less, but court costs and fees run it up. Obviously, the highway patrol has increased the quotas for patrolmen, keeping state revenues up in a time when the working people of the state are bringing in less income, hence paying less taxes. What do you do? Screw the working poor. They're easy to rape. They have no recourse. You never see a Cadillac by the side of the road with a highway patrol car behind it, blue lights flashing. The attitude of cops toward we the people has become more hostile, year by year, to the point we "citizens" (a dead word) are taken for criminals, treated like criminals, spoken to as criminals. They think they're being smart in the manner of arrogant people. They're making enemies and stand all the taller for it. This is why we did not want police state. Now it's a law that police departments are right to exclude the more intelligent applicants from a job as a cop. I thought that was already a natural law. It's like making a law requiring us to observe gravity. Throw something up in the air and if it keeps on going you're arrested. I said a whole lot more than this, talking with Carole, that I'm too paranoid to repeat in print. Paying the fine is bad enough, then the hell you're put through from the moment you see the blue light until it's finally over, regarded a criminal every step along the way. Franz Kafka and George Orwell were prophets. We are now living in the adult world they foresaw. I lived it throughout childhood and youth, as have many. It is particularly reprehensible to see Kafka become the way of American enforcement. It must be inevitable, a process, a pattern. We laugh now at the old slogan, to serve and protect, like we laugh at wind, rain, sleet or snow, except in a Jerry Lee Lewis song.

 

 

antoni tapies

 

I was telling Carole that all my adult life cops and people in authority positions dislike me on sight. I don't have to make a face, say something smartass, nothing. They look at me and they see the enemy. It's so close to a hundred percent that I'm used to it. I've learned to go slack in the face of authority the way black people have learned that when a cop stops you, you go slack, be passive, no resistance. Otherwise, they beat the shit out of you, and might anyway. When you're white, it's not so overt. They don't give you respect, but they also don't treat you like a coon. People that go about with a superior attitude regard me exactly the same. On sight, like reading an aura, an authoritarian of any sort, official or self-styled, sees the enemy when they see me. I think my eyes have something to do with it. My eyes do not show respect for uniform or position. Nor do they show fear. They show absence of interest. That's what I feel. I know people I would call friends who have been involved in law enforcement in one way or another, people whose egos don't require they be deferred to as authority. The ones that need to be looked up to the most are the ones that hate me. I have this objectionable way of regarding people as who they are themselves, seeing through the transparent mask of appearance. I have this odd way of knowing people for who they are. Like when I saw Maureen Stapleton play Stella in Streetcar Named Desire, I saw Maureen Stapleton playing Stella, an actress, an artist performing a role. I don't know that I've ever lost sight of a performance enough to see just the role. Maybe in childhood I could have, but don't recall. Pre-teens I was in love with actress Claudette Colbert. Susan Hayward, too. Colbert as mother, Hayward as whore. My grandfather kept a picture on the wall of reclining Susan Hayward in his garage. It was the only thing I wanted after grandpa died, but couldn't ask anybody to attempt to mail glass. I imagine it's in a landfill by now.

 

 

antoni tapies

 

I'm recalling the time of the music store. The parking lot was across the street. PhDs were a riot. I could see it in them getting out of the car. It's a certain trim of a beard, a stance, presentably dressed in something English, and professorial patterns in behavior. I like talking and visiting with intelligent, educated people. I like it very much. One comes in the door, I speak, we engage  in brief conversation. Right away I see he is sizing me up, asking test questions, assessing my knowledge in relation to his. That's when I say them for those. It's all it takes. Don't even have to go so far as to say aint. I see the conclusion register in his eyes that it's just another yokel, exactly as per expectation in his wife's home town. I realize in that moment this is not an intelligent, educated individual, and I lose interest too, at the same time. Its in my horoscope. Not many years ago I found a friend from the years just after high school by way of internet. We emailed quite awhile. Turned out he had a PhD in Psychology; mental institutions, teaching at a university, in charge, authority, retired. I got really tired of his emails full of instructions that I am to read Henry Kissinger's memoirs, lists of assignments and essay test questions. I didn't do any of the assignments and sure as hell did not read Henry Kissinger's self-praise. I started writing the blog and he'd quiz me on what I'm talking about, told me to explain this and that, explain, explain, you're wrong, something else is the case. The worst, according to an old Sufi saying, the straw that broke the camel's back, was when he told me to explain something I'd put up in the column on the right, of quotations, the one from the Tao te Ching, Not knowing is true knowledge. Presuming to know is a disease. Another essay question to be graded. All I answered was, "You had to be there." Explain the Tao te Ching to a PhD in psychology? He's Doctor Science: he knows more than I do. Of course he'd heard of Carl Jung. No matter how I would have explained it, he'd have known better than I did. He really didn't get it and I couldn't help him with it. It was too wide a strait for a bridge. It wasn't long after that I told him to quit writing me and unfriended him on facebook. Next thing, I got another list of essay questions to answer. I blocked him from my email. He had become an authority. He let me have it for not addressing him Dr, saying, I have a lot invested in my PhD. I said, I don't give a shit.

 

antoni tapies

 

It's the same with people who believe having more money than I have makes them my superior. I tend not to see it that way, nor do I honor the expectation. They call me strange because my eyes don't light up and grovel in the mud of greed when they speak down to me. I am able to give authority to someone I assess deserves it, like a martial arts sensei, or a meditation master, a teacher of something I want to learn. Just because somebody puts on a certain kind of clothes doesn't mean shit to me. I see an individual human being; their clothes usually show what they want me to think about them. Carole suggested my resistance to authority personnel goes back to daddy. Bingo. He was not right in the head. He did not adhere to the rational. Didn't pay much attention in school. He never saw but one look in my eyes after a certain point, indifference, nothing. Sometimes he'd explode, I want some respect outta you! The kid would think and dare not say: Show me something to respect. My eyes came to show absence of interest. This is what authoritarians trigger in the look they see. I could not talk back or defend self or explain. You cannot control my mind, I am the enemy. I used my eyes to say it. This, I suspect, is the root of why authoritarians and people who need to be seen high up hate me on sight. They see no light of respect in my eyes, the look of the enemy. It kept me in trouble all the time in the Navy; authorities everywhere requiring obeisance in the form of a salute and being called sir. Out of the Navy, I never said sir again but in irony. It runs awfully deep, so deep I choose to leave it be and not bother with changing it. I feel like it serves me well. It keeps me away from people I don't want to be around without any effort on my part. The same as my attitude that anybody too good for a Pruitt is too good for me keeps the pretentious away, indifference to self-importance keeps authoritarians away, too. Win-win.    

 

antoni tapies himself

 

 

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AMERICAN RACISM POPS TO THE SURFACE

antoni tapies

The story of Florida racism is everywhere. Can't hardly go online without seeing Zimmerman's face or Trayvon's face. The trial was evidently pathetic. I've no emotion invested in which side won. I never doubted Zimmerman would come out not guilty, took that for a given. The South most often gets blamed for racist behavior, but only north Florida is the South. Central and south Florida is Yankee. What racism takes place there is not Southern. It's Northern. Now the talk is a new federal trial on wrongful death. Federal will be very different from a Florida town's courtroom. Regarding punishment for Zimmerman, I can't help but see he's already been punished severely. He doesn't have a life anymore. Didn't have much of one before, a tube-gawker and big-dog wannabe. Steven Seagal on patrol. Now, he probably needs to be detained in the county jail to keep him alive. Put him in prison, he's dead. Let him run free, he's dead. He's a dead man any way you look at it. He knows it better than we do. In prison, they would keep him in solitary like they did Jeffrey Daumer and Charles Manson. He is now in that company, people who will not stay alive inside prison or out. Somebody who already has a life sentence would kill him for the bragging trophy. How embarrassing for Zimmerman to have Ann Coulter of the Faux news channel cheering for him. He may be proud of it.

antoni tapies

When I say I saw the decision coming, I held out about .05% suspicion something odd could happen and it would work out against Zimmerman. In a town called Rosewood, west of Ocala and Gainesville, the white people set out to massacre the black community over a false rape charge on a simple black man there in 1923. The black people of Rosewood fought back. Well made and good acting in the movie with Ving Rhames, Don Cheedle, Jon Voight. Rosewood is the part of Florida that is the South. I don't mean to excuse Southern racism, I just get tired of the South getting the blame for racism when it is everywhere in USA. The white people that hate Obama are not particular to the South. No state, no region of the country is a hundred percent anything. Most states are on the line between one and another. Each election, the best propaganda campaign tends to win. I don't mean best by "quality," but by what works. Like Sarah Palin. She's the bottom where a quality politician is concerned. She's the top at what works when your target is the uneducated voters. Her message like W Bush's was, Yeah buddy, I'm dumb as a rock, just like you. By now it looks like republicans are putting all their eggs in the basket of anti-compassion. It's a basket that works politically. It's done wonders for the party since 1980. But there is a natural phenomenon something like a natural law, bullshit doesn't have a very long lifespan. The Reagan Revolution was so popular with both republicans and democrats that it looked like it's only counter force would be the time it takes for the bullshit to run itself out to the nothing that it was at the beginning. Like "trickle-down."

 

Florida's stand-your-ground law was run through the legislature by republicans. It's other name could be the open-season-on-niggers law. Republicans have made Florida, Texas, Arizona, and now are working on North Carolina, into the most demented states in the nation in their state governments. Now we have a new law that cops can't have above a certain level of IQ. Little boys playing big men. Alas, people with IQs think too much. Police state is rule by people who don't think, who don't even recognize Bob Dylan with his driver's license photo ID. If you'd like to see how police state works, check out George Orwell's Animal Farm. It's where cops got the name pigs in the Sixties, "Some pigs are more equal than others." Right now with the McCrory administration in NC, we are a racist state. Under democratic administration, NC is a progressive state looking to the benefit of all. It makes me happy to see the crowds of people demonstrating in Raleigh. These are not college students. Some are. What I see in the photographs is white middle-aged middle-class people, black middle-aged people, the black equivalent of middle-class. Largely people educated beyond high school. They don't count with republicans either, like college students. Educated people don't figure for republicans at all. USA has enough uneducated people to keep the republicans alive as the parrot party. McCrory is going by orders from corporate headquarters, not by what works to the good of the citizens. Look it up in the dictionary, republicans do not represent the people that voted them into power. It's in the definition of the word.

antoni tapies

I'd guess about 75% of this county is racist. In primary and general, Obama lost 75 to 25. It seems like a fair representation of the ratio. It was in Alleghany that I learned not to concern myself with other people's racism, only my own. People I respected way up high, like farmer Tom Pruitt and his factory-worker, farmer, preacher brother, Elder Millard Pruitt, were racist, Millard especially. One evening Millard and I were watching the news and talking. He mentioned to me he'd given money to what he called the Ku Kluxers. His wife walking through the room said, "You aint never." He said, "Talk to me!" A light-hearted way of saying I aint a-lyin. One evening that I was there watching the news with him, about once a week, I went with intent to make an appeal to him about racism, to convince him black people are people too, compassion, even love your neighbor kind of thing.

antoni tapies

During the news a bunch of beer bellied white working men in Mississippi or Alabama were taunting a 5 year old black girl walking on a sidewalk by herself through the gauntlet of those "creepy ass crackers," each one waving a beer bottle and wearing white tshirts, Invisible Empire printed on the front in black. News cameras and vans everywhere. Millard said in excitement like watching tv wrestling, "Now, there's a bunch of boys I'd like to be with." All my mental construct that I walked in the door with fell to the floor around my chair. Gone. In that thousandth of a second, I thought, What am I doing wanting to make him think like me? I said, "Would you be drinking the beer?" "No, I wouldn't be drinking no beer." I laughed at myself on the inside for days, weeks. It plumb got me over concerning myself with other people's racism, politics, religion, opinions or anything else. I saw in that tiny split-second, it aint none of my damn business. He wasn't telling me to be like him.

antoni tapies

If I've got a problem with racism, take care of it in myself. Earlier in the day I watched a video clip of some black guy I'd never seen before with ball cap on sideways, talking hip-hop hip, expressing with hands and fingers rapper style, explaining to his black brothers and sisters, especially the gang-bangers, the need to cut out the gangsta and prison recycle program, come into awareness, because they need to come together as a people. They are being defeated by white racism every day in legislation, in court cases, by police state. I paid attention to everything he said. We've had these kinds of speeches all the way back to Stokely Carmichael, every time some racist indignity comes to the surface. Obama's only apparent attention given the black people of America is telling them in speeches to get up off their asses and get with it. No matter what will be Obama's legacy, my feeling is that having a black president, especially a well educated one, has brought American racism to the surface. Some people seem surprised, like it's a new surge. It's only a surge in that it's come out from the background. It hasn't been popular on tv to be a racist. Television's attempt to be racially sensitive with black people in commercials, black tv shows, black characters in white tv shows, hasn't converted anybody. Television gives the appearance of little to no racism, convincing its devotees, like judge Roberts of the Supremes, the issue of racism is over and solved. LOL. Tell me another good one. He's a republican. He didn't believe that. He knew what he was doing, keeping the African Americans down. A toast with drinks before dinner at the club.

antoni tapies in person

 

 

 

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