FOOT OF SOMEBODY'S BED IN PROGRESS

foot of somebody's bed

Working on an art project. It has slipped away from original vision. The colors in my mind and the colors working together in composition, seen by the external eye, were quite different. I liked the colors, but did not like the feeling in them together. It's feeling I play with visually. Feeling is number one. I may do too much of only one range of feelings. I look for a feeling of calm, of stillness, the relaxed, quiet stillness of a pond's surface in early morning. I look for this quiet in the simplest form of the fewest lines. Perhaps, my search for this quiet in the painting before, of round fruits and vegetables, followed by musicians, took me close enough to these minimal lines I'm playing with now, the magnetic draw of the most simple, itself, pulled me the rest of the way. I found the stillness I looked for in the most simple lines, using shadow and light. This one I'm laying the paint to keeps on changing before my eyes. I want one thing, see it and don't want it. I feel like I'm tuning what's seen by the outer eye to the vision seen by the inner eye. And the other way around, tuning inner eye to outer eye. Going with what works. I've been painting the parts and this morning put them together to see what it's getting at. You can see in the pictures fingerprints and the general mess of handling. Will put final coat on the blue parts when the parts are fixed in place. Next step is screwing the vertical and horizontal lines into place from the back. Puzzling over how to keep the parts in place on the front while drilling from the back, it came to glue them down, let the glue dry, then drill from behind and insert screws without messing up the alignment of the parts.

The white surface behind the lines has been a light brown, white, red, and back to white. The light brown looked great in my mind's eye, but next to the blue, it killed both colors. One color drained the life out of the other. I like the white, but felt a soft red would be better. The red killed it too. Did not want to use yellow. White it had to be. White brought the whole to life. I was somewhat inhibited seeing the blue and white as school colors. But concluded white and blue still look good together without the association, even with it. Using a color other than white was the beginning of complex. I like the raw simplicity of white, like a sheet of paper or a gessoed canvas. The white paint I'm using has a soft touch of gray in it that does no more than soften the stark quality of refrigerator white. White makes a better screen for the shadows. A cadmium red would have worked well with the blue, but again, first step into complex. The point is a vertical line in relation to a horizontal line inside a rectangle. The white allows it to suggest no more than lines in relation to each other. The wood of the frame is three inches deep. The wood for the "bed" is an inch and three-quarters deep. They cast a wide shadow. The pictures show the lines in four directions of relation to light source, in this case the open door. The shadows it makes are better than I saw in mind's eye. I like using shadow in the composition, a third color that is not there, a large part of the composition that changes with the direction the light falls onto it. Initially, the back was masonite. I did not want the smooth side or the side with the window-screen mesh pattern. Cut some paper from a feed bag and glued it to the rough side of the masonite.

I knew I could not glue a piece of paper to it and the paper be smooth like the other side of the masonite. I did not want perfectly smooth. I knew wrinkles would happen in the paper gluing it down, so I spread it and smoothed it the best I could, without taking too much care. I wanted what wrinkles happened to be despite me, not composed by mind. I cut the paper by eye, instead of measuring, I wanted an uneven edge allowing chance a role. I wanted a tiny bit of the masonite weave around the edge. In some places it's a quarter inch, in some places I didn't quite leave any space. Good. All I wanted was uneven all the way around. It only shows slightly, but it accords with the wrinkles in the paper, texture made by chance. The frame and the two lines are so totally mind, I wanted the context of the white to have some unforeseen in it to balance the straight lines of mind. I questioned in the beginning if allowing chance might be a step into the complex. Yes it is, yet it saves the whole from being all mind, gives balance. It looks accidental, not-mind. I feel like it's a view of our existence. We live in mind in a world that is not-mind. We use one to balance and fine tune the other. I think of it as learning how to live in this world. I believe this is what the Tao is about, learning to accord mind with the illusion we call reality, individual mind with the way of nature, cycles, tuning in to invisible forces, what I think of as natural laws, like karma, which works as surely as gravity, the flow. If the finished project shows what I think I'm putting into it remains to be seen. My aim is to finish it after I finish this writing. Letting the glue settle under the weight of two rather large books, Louise Gluck's, Poems 1962-2012, and Robert Bly's, Stealing Sugar From The Castle.

 
Next step is to drill four holes from the back from the holes already in the masonite, to drill holes for the screws in the wood parts. Then run the screws in, then fix the back to the frame, fix a hanger to the back, turn it over, repaint the blue and touch up the white. There was a time in the visioning period I saw black and white. I liked it, but it seemed too obvious, too expected. The blue has a different resonance, more in line with the feeling I was looking for in it. Black with white, they're loud as a truck horn. The blue with white eases the intensity down to a car horn. Colors other than white would have rendered the shadows invisible or nearly so. I wanted the back to be a screen for the shadows, the reason for using deep lines instead of flat lines. Using cardboard would have made shadow lines, too, though the deep wood casts bigger shadows. In indirect light it would make no shadows and that's good too. Any direction the light comes into it leaves its own particular shadow pattern. I've been fussing with it in my mind for a few weeks. The frame I've had in the house at least fifteen years. I found a strip of wood a couple inches deep. I cut these two parts from it using the hand jigsaw. The drill, the jigsaw and the palm sander I keep in a bag together. When I need one, I often need another or all of them. These are the tools I use now, plus a hammer. The purpose in what I'm doing now with art projects is using materials in the house I have picked up over the years, something I could do something with some day. That day is now. I'm not putting things out the door, but keeping them in new combinations. I have so much of that kind of clutter in the house, my living space has become my studio. Need a part, go to the junk room and find one.

by tj worthington



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THE MYSTERY OF THE OBVIOUS

the hay barn

Perhaps the best thing for me to do is stop now. It may be best to just let it go for today. I'm in a rotten mood. Snowed in all day, didn't want to do anything. No music, no movie, no radio, little reading, minimal facebook, wanted to sleep all day and was interrupted just after I'd drifted into unconsciousness. No going back. Took grain to the donkeys in late afternoon, returning to the house immediately. I've laid about and laid about, watching my mood get moodier as the day went by. I turn on the radio and somebody is talking about cancer, turn the radio off. I don't think I have frustrated anger about anything in particular. It could be that I ate almost nothing yesterday and very little today. I tell self to eat something, have some Earl Grey tea, do something toward a new art project. I found some fir strips I did not know were here. This project will take some doing. It is nine six-inch plywood circles, half inch thick. Some plastic wood touches on each one will be necessary. Sanding them all too. Three rows of three circles held together by strips of fir three-quarters inch wide on the backside. The framework will run behind where the circles touch, rendering them out of sight. I'll have to fix each circle with screws in its place and make a system of numbers and letters to identify the locations on the framework where each circle goes. Take them off and paint each one of them, put them someplace to dry for a few months, then attach them to the framework with screws and glue. Doing anything toward it today was something I lacked the spirit for. I did find the sticks of fir, first step. 

mountain laurel

I'd so much rather put it together in my mind than get out the drill, the jigsaw, ruler, extension cord, paper and pencil. I have to be in a certain frame of mind for the construction. I need to see it clearly in my mind, and don't see this to the detail, yet, that I want to. This one is so labor intensive it stands before me like an obstacle course. It takes a certain mind to jump in. This is a particularly lazy day. Started a scrabble game this afternoon with somebody I'd played several games with. Forfeited the game this evening when I realized I really don't want to play scrabble anymore. I jumped in for a few weeks, but it took up too much time. My mind likes to make words out of letters, but it likes to do something else too. Comes a time I get tired of having all vowels. I used to search for the longest word and highest score I could get per turn. Today I put down the first thing I saw using no more than two or three letters, scoring 9 or 8 or 11, and not caring. Opponent scores 36, 28, 49, and I don't care. I see his score shoot way up past mine and don't care. Then say to self, if you don't care about any of it, why the hell are you wasting your time at it? I clicked on the forfeit button and left, promising self I won't be going back any time soon. At first, the game is about putting words together. Then it turns into strategies and numbers and scores. I can see the strategies are as endless as bridge strategies, I don't care to get that involved. I'd best stop playing it now that I see I don't like it anymore. I refuse to search for the highest score I can make per word. Knowing myself, I know when I'm done with something, it's over. No point in trying to force it, it will never come back. 

rhododendron

I have better things to do than focus my mind on making a higher score than somebody else. Why do I want to beat somebody at something? When I ask the question, Why?, it's over. I already know why. I've never taken an interest in competition. It may go back to my grandmother's wisdom she taught me with in childhood. I wanted to do something she thought foolish. She said, "What do you want to do that for? It's like a merry go round. You get on, you go round and round, you get off in the same place you got on. Where you been?" I didn't like the cold water that kind of thinking threw on what I thought was fun. But it never left me. Only heard it once and never forgot it. I don't even remember Bible verses that long I'd memorized for expectation in church. I remember Jesus wept. Woody Allen hit the nail on the head when he said if Jesus were to come back and see what all was done in his name, he'd never stop throwing up. It makes me laugh at these people who get their fifteen minutes of fame for some point of view devoid of compassion and call themselves Christian. I can only think they make Christian a bad name. Tell one that and be ready for the ensuing explosion of righteousness. I saw a funny clip yesterday on facebook of Pat Robertson, the wizened sage of the 700 (send me your money) club, warning that yoga is a Hindu trick to get us to praying, by way of mantra, to Hindu deities. We truly live in an insane society. When supreme ignorance passes for knowledge, the best place for me is at home. I'm doing facebook less, except for Daily Creative Practice page, bored by republican claims Obama is a Muslim. So what if he is. He has a Kenyan heritage. So what. The Bush family has a Nazi heritage and nobody complains about it. 

dogwood

I see how the Fake news channel has twisted the minds of half the American population, the below average half, white men, the obedient people most susceptible to propaganda, easy targets, and I want revenge. I want the world to be a better place, but it's not, nor is it going to be. It looks like globalization brought all the cultures in the world close enough together to see they hate each other. Ideally, bring everyone together in unity, kumbaya, but what happens when they see each other face to face: conflict. Beware of them Hindu deities. The Reagan Trojan Horse brought us division inside of division, divide and conquer. We're conquered. A cop kills an unarmed black man, woman or child and the video goes viral, he gets a paid two week vacation. Our government legislates against us, the judicial system decides against us. The corporate takeover of our government throughout the land regards "we the people" the enemy. Our resources are being drained from us into Swiss etc banks, shrinking the middle class into the working class, all of us the peasant class, a Mad Max world. I see this happening and what can I do? Read a book, advance an art project, have a nap, write, watch a movie? I've come to a place where I laugh at hope in myself. I can see now that civilization as we know it really is going completely away. It is at once incredibly interesting and dispiriting. Democracy gone away is not the end of it. In my lifetime I saw the pattern of anti-intellectualism in American life go all the way to anti-paying attention and then to anti-democracy. Them people up in Washington, they got things under control. Like my friend Lorne Campbell never dreamed he would live to see the Berlin wall go down, I never believed I'd see popular police state in America, though saw it coming since LBJ. I didn't take into account the full power of television. In my lifetime, I've seen television become American culture. I've seen the obvious become mystery. I warned you. I'm not in a good mood. However, I'll wake in the morning with a new light. Fare forward, voyager. Just had to ride this one out.       

home on waterfall road

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IT IS WHAT IT IS

tracks in the snow

Six inches of snow in the night. Cold, dry ice crystals make the slightest incline slippery. I went out to take seeds to the birds and slipped every step. Took a walking stick to feed the donkeys. Jenny wanted to smell it, feel it with her lips, take it with her teeth, thinking it might be something to eat, the handle the size of a carrot. I've carried a stick among them enough for them to know the stick is not a threat. I don't hit them or threaten them with it. It's for my balance. The donkeys stayed in their den until I went out to deliver their morning hay. Snow on the ground shows me the exact spot in the stream they go to for a drink of water. Later in the day I looked at their meadow from the road, saw the trails to and from the watering hole. They walk on trails. The meadow has trails going every which way. I find it curious so many of the four-leggeds walk the same path until it becomes a trail and remains a trail from then on. In the years I went on long walks through mountain forest, I walked on deer trails. It doesn't take long to find one. The other animals use their trails too. I've seen cows make trails, and now am seeing donkeys make trails. I wonder about trails in their original habitat, northeastern Africa, and see them everywhere. I think there are five hundred, more or less, of the original donkeys left. The people there eat donkeys and live in post-colonial poverty. The donkeys will last about as long as the mountain gorilla, the African elephant, the polar bear, the fish in the sea. It won't be long before the humans have a chance to learn how to exist on a dead planet, the ideal we've been aiming toward collectively throughout my lifetime. It's not just the corporate fisheries emptying the oceans, it's also the people eating fish in restaurants all over the globe and at home. Me, when I buy a tin of sardines. 

new project

My mind has relaxed from the rush of visualizing construction of the new project. I've written about the construction itself, though have not yet mentioned purpose. The construction is a three-legged stand to suspend a rock above the ground. Initially, the three sticks of wood were the aesthetic consideration without the rock. I wanted to lean three lines together such that they would hold each other upright without supports or any kind of hardware. Three boards, two notches, done. Ideally, in a place it would never be touched or swiped by a dog's tail. My test was to stand three lengths of wood in relation to each other, supporting each other. It has to do with a present fascination with triangles.  Every way I look at this model, all the way around it, it makes triangles. The white line that holds the elements together, itself makes a triangle. All the way around it I see three triangles, including the white line. I don't care if someone looking at it fails to notice the triangles, which are there for aesthetic structure of my own, it's purpose, it's reason for being. A lot of people get through their lives without understanding the meaning of life. In like manner, some will see the triangles a theme, some will not. The rock is there for the weight, to keep a tension in the single line of quarter inch white nylon rope that holds the legs in place, to pull the three boards tighter together, an assist to free-standing, the downward pull of gravity. The rock's role is purely functional. A bowling ball would do. But I like a rock better. The rock becomes the focus of interest framed by the stand that holds it aloft. Since living in the mountains, I have come to see every rock, itself, a piece of sculpture made by God, by way of chance and experience, Like snowflakes, no two are alike, even gravel in a driveway, big rocks dynamited from a bigger rock, ground by rock-crushing machines into small chunks. 

new project

In my own personal symbolism, I think of a straight line, a square, masculine, and a curved line, a circle, feminine. For several years I painted round things in square and rectangular frames. Balance. I mean masculine and feminine like in languages, le and la, I think of a triangle the blend of a square and a circle, the child of the square and circle, a balance of both. First, there was one, then there were two, and from three onward it's infinite. Three represents the many.  In this construction I'll call Hanging Rock, the straight lines of the boards and rope make a network of masculine lines to frame and support the feminine, the rock, Mother Earth. I think of lines as mind, the conscious mind, and the rock the subconscious mind, feeling, intuition. The mechanics of this project is the masculine aspect, cut, measured and fitted together by mind. The suspended rock I'll call the subconscious, the force holding conscious mind together, the feminine, gives shape and definition. Therein I find the balance of masculine and feminine, le and la, in a simple object of rock and wood. Therein is what I'm saying in the piece, balance, the feminine and masculine, the yin and yang, interdependent, one whole. My first consideration for something outside where several people will see it, is to make it as interesting to a man's eye as to a woman's eye. Call something art and the men in the world I live in pay it no mind, see it without seeing it. The women will give it a chance and look at it aesthetically, liking it or not, say, Somebody might call it art, but I don't see no art about it. I want both the man's eye to see it and the woman's eye to see it. They will see what they see, art or not art, but they will see It, call it what you want. Calling it Hanging Rock will relax the mystery of what it is. It is what it is. Plain.  

jack and jenny, yin and yang

My feeling is the masculine eye will see the mechanics of it, all the mechanics out in the open, part of it. I feel like the man's eye will see the boards, treated 4x4s, familiar, masculine, as well as the way the rope holds the thing together and suspends the rock. The rock will be familiar to the masculine eye. No what-is-it mystery about it. It's three boards, a rock and a rope. I feel like the feminine eye will see the whole without much interest in the mechanics. And women appreciate rocks, largely, in aesthetic ways men largely don't see. The rock suspended provides a point of tension for everybody. It's a subconscious feeling that a rock does not belong in the air. A rock belongs on the ground. A suspended rock plays with the automatic assumption from a lifetime of experience that a rock belongs on the ground. If someone were to ask me what it's supposed to be, I'll only be able to answer, it is what it is---three boards, a rock and a rope. My feeling is kids will like it. I gave one of my favorite paintings to the library, red, yellow and green bell peppers, asking them to hang it in the children's section. I wanted the kids to see it. I like for kids to like my paintings. A kid liking it tells me it's real. My first clue it is attractive to the masculine eye was Justin liking it, taking an interest in the mechanics right away, raising and lowering the rock, getting a sense for how it works. Aesthetically, it's cool with him if I want to call it art. I can call it anything I like. He'll call it three 4x4s, a rock and a rope, which is how I want him to see it---it is what it is. There is nothing it is supposed to be. To my eye, it is triangles and a suspended rock, what it is. I wanted it to say something about the mountains. That it simply is what it is, not pretending to be something it aint, just plain, is mountain as a fiddle tune. 

shadow on the snow

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