WORKS IN PROGRESS: 17 AND 18

a stack of books makes good clamps

The weather turned cold again. Today the air had floating crystals. I stepped outside to take carrots to the donkeys and felt a barely perceptible precipitation on my face. The temperature stayed just above 32 all day. As soon as the sun set, the temperature dropped below 32. Made a run to town for grocery store and a stop at Farmer's Hardware. Back home, I put braces on the backs of four pieces of plywood toward painting them. Glued the cardboard onto two of them. These two I think of as a pair. Thought about making them a yin-yang of each other, but that bored me. Each is uniquely itself now. One of them has a piece of torn cardboard. I've been wanting to try that. This one is the test. It might be simply dead, though I won't know until it's done. Color is very important on this one. I feel like the wrong color will kill it and the right color make it dance. Thinking about pink. Haven't made one pink yet. I'd like to make a gorgeous, silken pink, intense and soft. Not pastel. Thinking of the two as a pair, I was thinking 1955 Ford pink and gray. May do it yet. The two might go together better as not yin-yang with each other. The other board I glued two pieces of cardboard to. It is standing on its side now with books on top for weight. I wanted to wrap the cardboard around the edge with a half inch lip. I'll keep the weight on it overnight to be sure the glue is firm. Yet, back to yin-yang, the one on its edge has a masculine sense, while the one with the torn cardboard has a feminine sense. Maybe a masculine color would be good for this one, blue, baby colors. I'll see when I get there. 

17

Under the influence of my Daily Creative Practice friends, I've begun to take pictures of works in progress, steps along the way. Before, I'd just get pictures of the finished piece, never thinking of the process from start to finish a unit. Gluing and screwing the braces onto the backs of plywood boards I tend to think of as something extra from the finished piece. Today, I was drilling holes for the screws and feeling the thrill of putting the structure together, the surface for the paint, the rectangle. Tomorrow I'll apply the gesso to these two and paint the black edge. Next day or so, when I'm feeling it, I'll apply their colors. I like pink and blue. It could be fun to put the blue on the feminine form and the pink on the masculine form. It would be totally subliminal. No one would notice but me, That one's ringing temptation through my electrical system. This is getting so involved, I'll probably use some other colors. Already the pink and blue has become a cliche. Don't want cliches. I'll pick their colors without regard for the other. That's how I did the cardboard. One part of my mind sees them a pair. Another part of the mind wants them separate and not referring to the other. Twins that don't dress alike. Gluing down the cardboard is a commitment to an image the paint will make important. I want to make a cardboard statement on each one, individually, its shape being the subject. I want them to have the freshness of chance. The lines of light and shade are the ultimate subject. I don't like to put too much mentation into where the lines will appear on each one. The arrangement of the cardboard is about those lines of light and shade. From half way across the room, only those lines are visible on a plane of color.

12

I like that up close the cardboard is visible as such, while at a little distance it returns to one plane with light and shadow lines. I like that. It's almost a juxtaposition. An added dimension that is visible up close and disappears with distance. I'm looking in mind for a way to make the plywood surface the positive space, subject, and the cardboard the negative space. I'll attempt that on the next one after these two. It is almost a square. I see what I think I want to do. Seen in the mind's eye and the 3-D object, itself, can be very different. What I see in my mind might be terrible on the board. But it's a place to start. On the board I can make arrangements and see what happens. Chance is very important. The structure of the rectangle is not chance, but visual inside the rectangle, though a mental construct, I feel like needs chance in there too. The curved and jagged line of the torn cardboard represents chance in this one. The other one with two pieces of cardboard I saw in my mind's eye and cut to what I saw, arranged it, liked what I saw and when I put the glue on and placed them, it was entirely different from what I set out to do. I realized I was already bored with it, and if it bores me that quickly, I don't want to do it. The new arrangement happened without mentation. Surprise. I feel like I'm engaged in artistry during the construction of the surface period, where before, I thought of it more as carpentry. Two separate events went into each piece. Now that I am seeing the carpentry aspect a part of the finished artwork, it's all the more fun. I want each piece to have freewheeling fun about it. 

18 having its sides clamped

The verse from the Tao te Ching I posted yesterday spoke what I am aiming toward in each of these, simplicity, patience and empathy. The simplicity is self-evident. Simplicity is a primary guideline. When mind starts complicating a visual idea, I pull back at a certain point and declare it too complicated, not what these pieces are about.. They are about the most simple I can get it, a line of light and a line of shadow on one color. The only way I can see simpler would be not to use paint, just show the raw materials, though that gets into a degree of visual complexity. Patience, I see patience in a certain stillness they have. They are quiet, even when the color is loud. I see a stillness in one color. These two will be 17 and 18. I've been following what I learn from one piece to the next. The progression is becoming visible. I'm leaving rectangular shapes and going into more interesting shapes, though the rectangle is important. And empathy for itself. I'll interpret empathy to be each one's reference only to itself, it is what/who it is, complete in itself. Each one is it's place in a series and each one is itself. They work well in a cluster of them on the wall and they work well alone. I don't know that anybody will ever see what I'm seeing in this series. The beauty of it for me is that it doesn't matter if somebody likes it and somebody else doesn't. I'd know that would be the case if I painted like Norman Rockwell. Some would say, Oh what great art, and some others would say, What a bunch of shit. I don't think what I'm doing is "great art" by any means, though I feel like this series is touching art, getting there. It's neither pole of the extremes. I'm playing with art like a child. Therein, I'll say, is the empathy.  

braced for next

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OTHER AND SELF

marino marini

We're in a time of being manipulated into division over caring and not caring. All my life the people who go by conservatives, who used to be called reactionaries and hawks, have looked down on the progressives, the doves, the peaceniks. It's like the heat is turned up and the parts in the stew are swirling in the pot, the bottom rising to the top and the top going to the bottom. In our democracy where we are declared created equal as the foundation of our law, the present illustrates the movement cut loose by the Reagan Revolution of belief that one man's ignorance is the equal of another man's knowledge. It's frightful that the political party representing half the population, the below average half, believes education is misleading religiously and politically. The half of the population that sometimes entertains rational thought is largely overwhelmed by aggression of the ignorant obsessed with abortion, pussy, racism, in other words, smokescreen. Everywhere I go I hear somebody making a declaration that starts with "This country." It's all mental generalizations categorizing the unknown.

 

marino marini

 

 

It has become amusing to hear the varieties of the lists that follow this country. It's like a collective wave is going through USA that seems like self-examination, but turns out to be figuring out what's wrong and pointing the finger of blame. Blame the other while three fingers point back at self. We're picking it apart relentlessly, even mindlessly albeit by way of mentation. The trend coming into the new century is surrealist slayings in random locations all over the country. By surrealist I mean in the time of Surrealism in Paris between world wars one and two. One of the surrealists declared the ultimate surrealist act would be to carry a pistol into a crowd and shoot someone randomly. The other surrealists did not take to his idea and soon after put him out of the group. They were creators, artists, not killers. Love was the surrealist theme. Killing did not file well with love. The so-called ultimate surrealist act is now common news in television world where fantasy is reality. Somebody with advanced degrees in psychology, a guy not long out of high school, a guy working at a shipyard. Before the surprise mass shootings were the post office shootings by frustrated employees let go and denied their pensions.

 

marino marini

 

 

It's easy to say it's an expression of disregard unto contempt for others. Killing anyone who is present with no personal reason is an obvious expression of contempt, the most obvious. Looking at the lists of comments after almost any kind of article online, often the rudest, most contemptuous language is used by somebody who doesn't even know who it is on the receiving end, the other. Disregard for others is from ego and the Western attitude toward self in relation to others: me first, others last. The people committing these  outrageous acts for television news show absence of regard for other as a self. No empathy. Throughout my lifetime, experiences in this world trained me away from empathy until the time the Light revealed itself to me. Once I've seen it, I cannot live as though I had not. It's only then that empathy became important. In the time of developing my ego, the time before my understanding, empathy wasn't even a word I knew. I don't mean to sound like a preacher who tells about himself as the worst sinner who drank, played cards and danced, until Jesus turned him away from his evil ways. Not that at all for me. I wasn't living an evil life. I was just trying to make my own light and it never worked.

 

marino marini

 

 

On this side of the divide of empathy / non-empathy, I can see that somebody who has watched people killing on tv every day of his life since a baby can act without empathy. The other is the same as a mushroom. So much contempt for the other indicates three fingers pointing back at self. Self-loathing appears to be an epidemic of this time of the center not holding. The people who commit these slayings most often kill themselves. The guy in Aurora, Colorado, who did not kill himself is a mystery to me, something like Bradley Manning who released a Pandora's box of US government secrets knowing he'd be in maximum security prison for life, no parole. You don't do something like that not knowing what is next. I believe he wanted prison. That's not a psychic insight. It's how it appears to me going by what I've seen about him. The Colorado shooter evidently wanted to live the rest of his life in torment. I don't understand these people, because I don't understand anymore the absence of empathy. I don't believe it's widespread as these psycho actions make it seem. I don't believe these isolated incidents of zero empathy tell anything about the rest of us.

 

marino marini

 

 

I see the news, hear the talk, read articles and books, hear interviews, and I see the people in the world I live in. We're not anything like the generalizations and categorizations we're pigeon-holed by. We're under immense stress as a culture, stress factor kept up by television that tells us relentlessly we're not good enough. It's the weakest link in the chain that snaps. Everybody I know has strength of character that could never allow themselves to sink to that self-centered a way of life. That kind of self-centered behavior is particular to the individual. Each of us has our own karmic history that is particular to self, same as personality, fingerprints and horoscope. In the rainbow of human experience we range from the lowest down dirty chickenshit emeffer from hell to the most gracious flow of helpful kindness in an uplifting spirit. We run the scale of everything between these poles in what we call duality. Most of us waver in the middle somewhere. A swing to the right is balanced by a swing to the left, back and forth, the pendulum of time. I live in a world of wonderful people who would lend a hand before they'd take from behind your back. Empathy is slow to leave mountain culture, despite several generations of television stripping away empathic values from traditional beliefs. Yes, the end is near when the false values are cleared from our traditional beliefs to make way for the new. The beginning is next. That's the part I'm looking to. The day after the last day is the first new day. The last day has to happen to let the new day come in.   

 

marino marini

 

 

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