STARTING A NEW PAINTING

new beginning

Did a little painting today on the new one of Jr Maxwell playing his 5-string. I put flesh on his face and hands, his hair in place, got the hands placed on the banjo, made the circle of the banjo head fairly well. I only make circles and geometric shapes free-hand, including the banjo neck, two long straight lines. I like the bit of waver in a line that is "straight." With gentle wiggles in the line, it has a movement about it, subliminal to be sure. A ruler-edge straight line is dead in my visual perception. I always find at this stage major errors in placement of shoulders, hands, knees, nose, glasses, chin, ears, hair. This second phase after the initial sketch and color placement I find places that are a bit off and correct them in this time. This visit with it I found what I want to do next time, the blue shirt and blue pants, cobalt blue work clothes. The right shoulder and arm I want to have close to the light source, bright to white and dark to deep cobalt. Have the dark and the light dancing in the folds of the cloth in relation to the light. That will bring the shoulder forward. The left shoulder and arm I'll have very low contrast in the folds of the cloth, which will set it back visually. I want the right shoulder forward, sit him at an angle leaning over the banjo head, big white moon.


Wanting to do the Whitetop Mountain Band next, I started this one of Jr Maxwell. I'd been wanting to make another portrait of him, this time a solo portrait. I was looking through some photographs and found one of Jr Maxwell that jumped at me. He was picking his bluegrass banjo. I wanted to make one of Jr to be a match to the one of Willard playing his guitar. I like the dynamic nature of that one of Willard with the red square behind him in blue shirt and yellow guitar. I want this one to have its own power. I've thought about painting a faint pattern of the moon on the banjo head. Wouldn't want to do it too obvious, just a suggestion. Maybe. Not sure yet. Just a thought to toss around. I like the long black line of the neck making a diagonal line in relation to the circle. It suggests a sign by the side of the road. On first glance, the diagonal black line suggests one of those signs with the red circle and the red diagonal line that means DONT. They catch our eye because they have information we need to know with reference to the highway. This one is not red, but just the icon of the circle with a diagonal line draws attention. Once the eye pauses on the image, there sits a man in the icon playing a banjo, more circles.


Attempts to make a chrome ring around the banjo head will be done using black and white lines close together, using those opposites together bring it forward. Like first glance it's a sign, then the eye settles and it's a man sitting in a circle with a banjo. Has the plane of the big circle and the plane of the white circle, and between them a man sitting slightly diagonally. I'm seeing where it's going and liking what I see. He already seems to have dimension about him. What do I mean by dimension? I mean his face had taken on the beginnings of roundness, the posture is starting to take an interesting twist over the banjo. Already it feels like he is in tune with the banjo. They are one. I'm looking at it, seeing the next phase, seeing the advance beyond what is there now. Beginning to see where I want to take it. I want to make the banjo dazzle, the chrome rim that is several circles and the black neck with a thin white line along each side. Those white lines will be interesting. One day I'll feel it, squeeze a glob of white out of the tube and git-er-done in just a few minutes. No point even attempting it when I'm not feeling it. I've found with things like that, like with fiddle bows, there's no point even attempting it when I'm not feeling it. It's just one of those moments, you know it when it's upon you. This is what I like about art forms, how they evolve.


I'm noticing that the right side of the image, the half circle and the black diagonal line suggest flatness, like maybe a clock with the big hand on the 2, then the dark image on the left turns out to be a man sitting down picking a banjo. When the left side becomes interesting to look at, the round banjo head with the hand in the middle of it draws attention. It comes way forward from the dark blue shirt and pants, and they come way forward from the circle behind. In first glance it goes from flat to having depth and back to flat. I like that. A little bit of visual tension in the colors. When I look at those three levels, they go back and forth. The hair is mostly gray with some black outlines and some white. I'll work the hair to bring the head forward and to help round it. I could leave it like it is right now and call it Don Reno. But it's not Don Reno. Reno was Jr's favorite bluegrass banjo picker. He appreciated the Earl Scruggs style of banjo, too, but Reno was da Man. I'm glad that the image suggests Don Reno, because it was his picking Jr would aspire toward. I don't have to do anything to bring out that suggestion; it's already there in the image. Good.


Already the face is looking like him. Won't have much to do on his face beyond rounding curves and accomplishing the illusion of roundness. That's where the fun is. Part of it. The fun is seeing a likeness occur, playing with the likeness with light here, dark there, until the person I know comes through. That's when I stop. When I have the likeness, any additions will take away from likeness. It's the same when the eyes can see. I'll fuss over the eyes until the moment comes they can see. I never touch them again. His right hand appears to have some motion in it. I'll see what can be done to enhance that suggested movement. In the middle of the white orb that is the banjo head, that hand is rather much like the focal point of the painting. Therefore, it must dance. It will dance. It might be fun to give it an Italian Futurist touch, just enough of a blur at the edges to suggest motion. The noting fingers of his left hand can be dealt with similarly. That would be ideal to give them motion. That is the same thing with eyes and face; when it's there, it's there and I mess with it no more. I won't do the blur in such a way to draw attention to itself, just to be there as part of it, like the shoulder strap. And I may decide not to. A consideration.  


It's fun to start a new one. And it's fun to paint Jr again. In a wordless way, it's like communicating with him again. I'm seeing that here, again, I have a triangle running from right hand to left hand to eyes and back to right hand. That triangle is inside a circle, which is inside a square. I'm thinking painting the two sides of the canvas the same color as the circle. That could be either interesting or not. There's only one way to find out. If I don't like, black will cover it. Already I can feel his relationship with the banjo, the gaze, the focus, the fingers. If I can keep it in there, that feeling of his focus on his fingers and them dancing, that will be the "spirit" in the image, the spirit of life. That is the life energy in this image, the relationship between the eyes and the hands. It's beginning to find its direction, it's life. The triangle of the eyes and the two hands is where I find the living element to work with and bring forward, out in front of the banjo, adding an invisible plane in front of the banjo and the figure. If I can get that just right, and I can, or at least acceptable.

*

PAINTING JOHN BROWN'S DREAM

   

     john brown's dream, tj worthington 2012


There it is. I've been at this thing for four months. Not every day by any means. Long lapses of time between a few touches of the brush in one color. Then another time another color. It stands on a portable easel for light weight carrying with collapsible legs like a tripod. Handy. It stands to the left of the wall I'm facing with the home entertainment unit. Watching a movie, it's there. Reading, it's there. Listening to the news, it's there. Writing, talking on the phone, it's there. I see it all the time, and as I look at it ideas come to me for darkening this, lightening that, getting the hands to look flexible. Hair not too neat, but country men keep their hair neat and in place. I've learned that the more time I spend looking at the canvas while it's being painted upon, the more open I am for visual suggestions. Sometimes, just a touch in the right place can bring quite a lot together. Sometimes it doesn't make any difference at all. I've learned so long ago I forgot I learned it that ideas I get in my head don't look as good on a canvas as they look in my head. I think, Oh, great idea! Yeah, great idea, but it makes a lousy visual image put on canvas. What's interesting visually has to feed with visual ideas in direct relation to context. Green, black, brown and white together in an image looks one way when I see it in my mind and another way on the canvas with paint. It takes time to train the mind to have visual ideas that are not mental ideas. Mental ideas are dead in a visual art form. Anway they are for me.


Picasso's Guernica is not dead because it is made of visual ideas. Made of mental ideas it would be boring. That's what I'm getting at where mental ideas are concerned. Mental ideas, to me, are gray without much texture and variety. Though Guernica is painted in grays, it is not static. I suppose the Spanish Civil War was seen in black and white photographs in the Paris newspapers. A visual idea for a painter, like an auditory idea to a musician, has the light of inspiration about it. I don't know a clearer way to say that. It's that light of inspiration that I go for in everything I paint. Light of inspiration, what do I mean? I've been looking at it 3 weeks without touching it. I'm one to feel colors, so there comes a time after seeing the top of Gary's guitar awhile, something isn't quite right. It needs a very thin coat of white over the yellow to take the flash out of the yellow and set it back. The shade I had on it brought the guitar too far forward from where he was sitting in the back of the picture. Just that thin coat of white softened the intensity of the yellow until the guitar settled down into his lap.


George's banjo I wanted to come forward with a fairly intense yellow, it's a yellow wood with the silver hardware of an old-time banjo dancing in black and white streaks. The banjo's yellow draws it forward and at the same time pushes Ernest in his two shades of blue back to where his chair is. I learned that about yellow from Kandinsky's Concerning The Spiritual In Art after he studied color by scientific method and discovered yellow and red come forward all on their own. The colors have gradations from close to far away. I used these principles he found of colors to give a 3 dimensional sensation on a flat surface. I like to honor the 2 dimensional surface and not try to make silly attempts to give the illusion of 3 dimensional. I like to get a feeling of depth by use of colors. Like this one, there is quite a bit of distance between man in foreground and man in background. It has somewhat of a sensation of depth while at the same time staying comfortably in its 2 dimensional context. It is, after all, paint on a flat surface. I don't want to get involved in that's not enough--I need more,;I want to need less. I don't want to pretend against the nature of the surface, the context that all the colors of paint share. At the same time I like to play with the sensation of depth in a kind of juxtaposition with flatness that gives it a visual tension I like. Even though George stands out, it's size not sleights of hand with the brush. Also, I'd been wanting for some time to make one with blue, white and brown the colors, the brown of wood with instruments. The idea came from blue, white and tan look very good together, and at the same time as bland as the very definition of bland. They are Kingston Trio late 50s Ivy League with button down collars and khaki pants with a crease.


 I wanted to take those colors, breathe life into them and make them dance. They don't have to be dull. They're beautiful colors when allowed to play. Got a kind of diagonal oval going that the lines of the instrument necks and the musicians' arms make a triangle and the movement of the energy around that triangle makes an oval. It looks like it seems to have an oval of flowing energy around it. It's kind of tight in the center, the knees in blue and white and dark brown. To me it looks like a washing machine with the lid up looking at the circular energy in there, the colors in motion. I like the triangle of the instrument necks in relation to the oval of flowing energy in the rectangular frame of the picture itself.


The part I'm enjoying immensely about the paintings of musicians is putting a minimalist composition down for the background. This one I divided diagonally slightly, an ochre with a breath of red in it that makes it almost pumpkin. Above is white. Lower portion ocher, upper portion white. Though under the white are a series of vertical rectangles spaced more or less mathematically across the white. First vertical rectangle on left is 2" wide, very pale peach ice cream. Then a 2" very pale olive green, lime ice cream. The next vertical yellow rectangle is 1.5" wide and the green space the same, then the next yellow rectangle 1" wide, all about the same length coming down from above. Then four coats of thin white over the green and yellow wall softened it down until the design of rectangles behind them is softened down to off-white. At first glance, it's a featureless white. Then it looks like 2 different colors, then they become completely visible.


I had hoped when I did this that the more or less mathematical difference in sizes would give a certain dance to the painting. And it did. It was a visual idea that worked visually. It subliminally suggests movement like the pictures suggest depth. I don't know if anybody else would like my minimalist composition of ochre and white with the subtleties under the white. but I could see it on a wall looking good. Then I paint the musicians on top of the composition. In the picture, the ochre lower part is the floor. In my mind's eye I can divide the composition vertically into four vertical panels like a Japanese screen. If I penciled 3 vertical lines to separate it into 4 panels, I'd be the only one to get it. I don't like putting private jokes in paintings, though sometimes I do,  That's only for my mind's eye. I don't want to make it like I'm pretending it looks like something it's not, like printing wood grain on formica. None of these principles I'm rambling about is a rule or even a rule of thumb. I do them because they come to me as a visual idea, and that only. Like a mountain musician likes to make music for the fun of making the music, I am now enjoying making images for the fun of doing it. There is no better reason than that for just about anything.

*

TAURUS THE BULL AND SEA CROSSINGS

    the world is a mirror

Today I applied the first paint to canvas on a new portrait of three musicians from the area. They're sitting in folding chairs at a jam. Two banjos and one guitar. It feels good to be inspired by something new, a composition I like, interesting color juxtapositions to work with. Also saw the Swedish film, THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET'S NEST. It was one of the girl with the dragon tattoo trilogy from the novels by popular Swedish writer, Stieg Larrson, who recently was in the news. He had delivered his manuscript for new novel to the publisher, evidently was happy with the results, undoubtedly a film contract, the elevator wasn't working at his apartment building, he ran up the stairs, fell down with a heart attack and died. What a raw deal. It's like the old feller that said, If it weren't for bad luck, I wouldn't have no luck at all. This film today gave me a good idea of the kind of story Larrson wrote. He's a complicated story teller.



It's a good story full of twists and turns, but it doesn't come near Victor Hugo's Les Miserables. I don't mean to crow for classic literature, it's just that since seeing the Bille August film of it, I'm still blown away by Hugo's story telling. I've never read any of his writing. I'd seen Lon Cheney and Gina Lolabrigida do the story about the hunch-back bell ringer, The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I never thought of it a story I'd want to read. I wrote Victor Hugo off as 19th Century good writing that I don't care much to read more than a century later. But I forget about Tolstoy, Chekhov, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Melville and others, really good story tellers who can't help it they lived in the 19th century. The movie of the Hunchback of Notre Dame was good enough for me. It didn't draw me to want to read the story. It didn't draw me to Hugo. I liked the story, but didn't get it. I've an idea if I were to read it today, I'd at least come close to getting it. After Les Miserables, I'd like to see the Hunchback again to reassess it. Probably more than 50 years have passed since I saw it, not the same moviegoer then as now.



I don't stop thinking about Les Miserables. I don't feel like it's left me with a mystery, but it left me with such satisfaction in story telling that my appreciation for Victor Hugo went way up. Like every time I read something by Leo Tolstoy, I ask myself why I ever read anybody besides Tolstoy. The answer to that is easy. There is so much else, much of it almost as good. My friend Lucas did his PhD thesis on James Joyce. He said he was told by somebody he knew, who studied Joyce's work, that nobody has read Finnegan's Wake all the way through. The only way to read it is to open it randomly and read as much as you feel like reading and put it down. He said that's as good a way as any to read it.



My neighbor and friend Allan Joyce, who studies his family genealogy all the way back to the Garden, claims a distant connection with James Joyce, no doubt as distant a connection as I might claim with EM Forster, Forster my grandmother's maiden name. My Forster ancestor that left the UK surely was the no-good in the family, the outsider at home, who crossed the sea with a dream. Surely the dream was totally unrealistic, and the crossing on those sailing canoes that killed children and women with disease and despair, the labors of the crossing committed him to his dream with no foundation but rumor. Like a Cuban crossing a sea of sharks to Miami in a tractor inner tube. In both cases, crossing the Atlantic in the 18th century in one of those wooden sailboats that rode the waves like a cork, and crossing the water from Cuba to Miami in a rigged device, the center of a ring of circling shark fins, must have been about the same degree of lethal. Perhaps about half make it, either way. It takes commitment.



All my life I've been an American in the sign of Taurus, Scorpio rising; Saturn, Uranus and Jupiter conjunct the Sun, Neptune at the Zenith. The characterization of Taurus the Bull I warn reckless people about is --- Don't make him tear down his pen to get out. That means don't piss him off. It's a bull in a pen. Piss him off too much and he'll tear down the pen to get at you. I have spent my life avoiding that line. When Taurus within sets to snorting, some shit's about to cut loose. I don't like to get myself into situations where the inner bull is called upon to scratch at the ground with a restless hoof. On YouTube I saw a couple days ago video of a hunter attacked by a buck. The buck stood on his back feet and frailed the man with his front feet like a boxer hitting a punching bag. The buck didn't let up. He kept at the man, hurting him with intent.



Evidently, the buck didn't mean to kill him or he'd have used his antlers. Seems like. He gave the man a sound thrashing with powerful front legs and knife-sharp hooves. He looked like he was giving the man an understanding he'd never forget. I felt like the buck was telling him in deer language to quit killing his women, uncles, cousins, like, when is enough enough? They know what's going on in their world when their mothers and sisters and brothers are killed by the humans that stalk the forest in fall and winter. BANG. Your knees give out. You're on the ground. Want to run. Can't move. A dreaded human approaches. You're overcome by fear, too weak to feel it, and worst of all, the human has a knife, cuts your throat. The light goes out.

*

PAINTING FIDDLER HOWARD JOINES 2

howard joines, fiddler of pine swamp, chicken reel

Here is the photograph of what I wrote about yesterday, Howard Joines. Last night it was too dark to go outside and hang it on the side of the house. I have a good light inside, but it makes glare, lotsa glare. Took this picture in the gloaming, after sunset, before dark, no glare. It worked out all right, a bit dull in the colors, but you get the drift. It reproduces the image. All that's left to do is put the strings on the fiddle, which comes after everything is dry. I lay a yardstick on it and draw the line with a colored pencil. It works really well. Also, I suggest them. I'm drawn to do both on this one. My preference is to suggest. I'm not using assists for the painting, though for an instruments strings I'm ok with a yardstick and pencil. But for painting straight lines, I don't use a stick to rest my hand on to still the jitters of having a nervous system. I let my inaccuracies have their say too. If I can't paint a straight line, an almost straight line will have to do.

I'm happy with the fiddle. It was as exacting as the face. I wanted the face to be one his relatives would recognize on sight. I want the fiddle to be the same way. Not exactly like his fiddle, but have the look of being a particular fiddle, not painted with measured exactness, a little bit off in this curve, a little off in that curve, nothing exact, esp perspective, but it's close enough that from the distance of 3 feet or more it looks like it's approaching photographic realism, but up close, all that just goes away. Loose lines, fuzzy edges. Looking at it from a distance I see a study in triangles. His shirt is loaded with triangle lines, the fiddle and the bow make a triangle, the roost the hen is on suggests a triangle, the window is a triangle. A triangle of negative space between his arm bent at the elbow holding the bow, and the side of his shirt. Inaccuracies seem to me to dance before the eye. I like the dance they do with the viewer's eye. It seems to my eye, a little bit offness all around ads a little life, like a subtle movement. I don't think I'm saying this as a justification, but may be. Either way is ok.  

I didn't realize when I started painting mountain fiddlers how satisfying it would be, and how necessary it would become. By now it feels like I'm making icons of the people who carry the spirit of mountain culture. The religion doesn't work any more, and the spirit of the culture is weak. The music is the living spirit of mountain culture. It's very much alive. Howard was one of the carriers of the fire. One of the great ones. We don't have much of his music recorded. What I have in my collection I treasure. I would do well to put all my treasures such as field recordings, videos, cds, tapes, in a box for the library. Since the radio show is no more, I have a good collection of regional music that belongs in the library. Already I've taken a bunch to them. It's time for another batch. What it does to me is take all my best music out of the house. It's ok. I don't listen to it all the time. When I listen to old-time music at home, it's largely old-timey banjo pickers like Gaither Carlton, Morgan Sexton, Jont Blevins, the kind of music that has a good flow to it. I forget how much I enjoy the cd of Howard Joines and Jr Maxwell, both of them superlative musicians. I tend to put my treasures away and not listen to them, when that's where the music is I really want to be listening to.

It surprised me when Lucas Pasley turned up with some recordings of Howard and Jr together. I'm thinking the guitar might have been Clif Evans, whose tape I believe Lucas got it from. Jr told me he and Howard didn't play an awful lot together. They're known all around for playing together. Howard played mostly old-time and Jr liked bluegrass only. Old-time was "draggy" to him. For them to be playing together, Howard would be playing bluegrass. They took old-time tunes and bluegrassed them. Howard was as good a bluegrass fiddler as he was old-time. I think what Jr meant by they didn't make music much together was they were not in a band together. They were in different bands. They might show up at a jam together, or during fiddlers conventions, many kinds of possibilities. I think they played together fairly often, just not on a regular basis. Like when it happened it happened. Jr had tremendous respect for Howard's fiddling, for Howard himself, his mother's brother, Uncle Howard. 

I expect when Jr was young playing old-time, before bluegrass came along, he played a good bit of music with Uncle Howard who lived at the other end of Pine Swamp Road. Ed Atwood, clawhammer picker, lived across the Little River Creek from Jr, and was banjo with Howard's band. Jr's older half-brother, Welter Maxwell, was an old-time fiddler. Jr's cousin Richard, son of Howard, played guitar. His cousin Carol, Howard's daughter, played guitar. The whole bunch of the Pine Swamp Joineses were good musicians and good singers. Among the living ones is Dennis Joines, bluegrass singer and guitar picker. Last I heard his band is New River Bluegrass. He also has a responsible job that keeps him on the road between home and Winston-Salem a lot. I always think of Dennis when I think of Pine Swamp musicians. He can sing a bluegrass song. He has a singing voice, like Jeff Michael, that is right for bluegrass and does it right. Jeff would rather be poor and make music, while Dennis would rather have a nice house, good woman, some kids, a home. To afford the home he wants, he needs to make some money. Howard was Dennis's uncle too. Dennis's dad, Walton, also a good singer and musician, was Howard's brother and Jr's mother's brother. 

I scrolled up to look at the picture and immediately saw a Pine Swamp Joines in his face. I saw Walton and Howard's son Richard, Dennis, and Jr's mother from photographs I've seen, the structure of the face. That's what I see when I see somebody is the structure of their face. I see it in the Joineses of Pine Swamp distinctly. Another thing I see that runs through them is they're all good people. They were Regular Baptists and went to New Salem on Pine Swamp Road. Howard is buried there. I remember seeing Walton's name carved on the back of one of the benches in the church. Walton left this world several years ago, and he did that when he was a kid, probably a teenage boy tied up in hormonal knots. Richard and Jr are the ones of these Joineses I've known the best, to sit and talk with awhile. I didn't mean the church reference as a qualification for someone to be "good people." Jr was not a church goer and he did everything "good" people aren't supposed to do. He was among the best when it comes to good people. I suppose by good I mean perhaps the least abrasive, generous, people you like to see again. That's it. People you like to see again. 

*

PAINTING FIDDLER HOWARD JOINES

tapo

Back to work on the Howard Joines fiddler painting. Repainted the fiddle, all of it, with colors closer to my satisfaction. Also put in the chicken, a ghostly chicken of the imagination, white on a white roost. She's leaning down toward his ear like she's singing into his ear. I'm happy with it. The hen is white and transparent like a spectre, like a memory, or a thought. I have her singing her note into his ear, because when he plays Cluck Old Hen, Cacklin Hen and Chicken Reel, old-time fiddle tunes with notes in them that are chicken notes, he plays the note of a hen cackling. Howard kept chickens, and you can hear it when he plays those tunes. They have notes that sound exactly like a chicken when old-time fiddlers play them, fiddlers who grew up with chickens. In the old days, about everybody raised chickens. Howard's chicken notes were perfect. Tommy Jarrell played a good chicken note. All the old-time fiddlers found those notes. That's changing now. The new fiddlers don't live with chickens. You can hear it when they play these tunes, it's a note approximating a chicken's note, but there's no chicken in it.


It was a good project to set this one back in motion. Had it going good and then froze when it came time for the fiddle strings and the bow. I finished two others while it waited. Didn't get the f holes perfect, but I don't care. I don't want perfect. I don't even care if it makes it look "folk art." That's what it is, so it doesn't matter if somebody says that. I'd be as happy with that title as any. The fiddle had already been brought up to the final coat of paint, which was applied today. I was ready to go, knew what had to be done, bore down and done it. Something I've not articulated before is the risk involved in painting, the constant need to apply each touch of paint just right, or close.



Years ago, friend Don Smith who liked to climb rock cliffs straight up, loved the risk. He told me I needed to get out and do something that involved some risk. I couldn't ever explain it, so I didn't try, but I set out on an adventure every time I approach a blank canvas. And when it comes toward the end when I have to paint 1/4" slightly curved line on a white shirt, no mistakes, the line having to cross the fiddle too, the line 2 feet long, I get paralyzed mentally and can't start, though I know I can do it, know I will do it, know that when it happens, it will take no more than 5 to 10 minutes. That part just about paralyzes me from knowing I have one chance and one chance only. It can only be done when I'm ready. One day I feel it, and it gets done in just a few minutes. When I start, instead of holding my breath, I control my breathing, keep it going so I don't pass out from lack of oxygen.


And there was getting the chicken right. Again, one time only. It's not perfect, which means it's just like I want it to be. I've put on a cd of Howard Joines playing fiddle with Jr Maxwell playing banjo, and I'm guessing Richard Joines playing guitar. They're playing Bear Tracks, Jr's banjo in the lead. Sounds good. Now I won't be able to write for listening. They are so good their music draws all my attention. Jr is picking something else now, beautifully. If I'd ask him the title, he'd say, "You don't know the name of that?" and he wouldn't tell me. I'd have to ask ask again. It would be in fun, making fun of me for not knowing. Not that he knew the names of all the songs. Howard's fiddle is working with the banjo that is going where the fiddle takes it. I took a risk when I put this cd on of letting the music take me over and it has. It pulls my ears and occupies my conscious mind that shuts down and receives this something that is so much better than anything that runs through my mind.



They're playing Just Because, a song Bill Monroe also recorded. I knew it before from Elvis doing it early when he was on Sun label just before he became a household name overnight. Jr plays well with a fiddler. He supports the fiddler, keeps the rhythm for him, doesn't get in front of him. Dance All Night With A Bottle In Your Hand. Howard plays this one especially lyrically. What a great fiddler. Jr's banjo works right along with the fiddle. Howard was Jr's uncle. Jr's mother came from an especially musical set of Joineses in Pine Swamp township. Oh it feels good hearing this good music. They're bluegrassing old-time fiddle tunes about like Art Wooten did. Art made two albums in his later years, one old-time and one bluegrass. Same bluegrass bands both times. This is how Art played the old-time tunes on his album, bluegrassed them, keeping the dancers in motion.



This rendering of Howard Joines is looking at being finished tomorrow. Just a little bit more to do. Could have done it today, but I wanted to give it another day. Looking at it, the chicken is right. She is present, but not overtaking. She's whispy as a spectre. This is the chicken he's hearing in his inner ear when he's playing the chicken note in Cluck Old Hen and Chicken Reel. I had to listen to him playing his fiddle to remind myself I'm painting an icon of a master fiddler. The chicken is part of the whole. She belongs. Her presence adds a kind of living quality to the whole. She draws attention from Howard's face, when the eye reaches the hen, it's drawn back to Howard's face. It sets up a rhythm like that with the viewer's eye. Unconsciously. The hen became an essential element to the whole as soon as she appeared. A couple of brush strokes, 2 red dots and a tiny yellow dot, the combs and beak, leaning from the roost toward the fiddler's ear, singing her note to his inner ear.



* 

A MAN OF THE CLINCH MOUNTAINS

the old abbot



Here is a better picture of the recently finished painting. I've never done anything like this. Done some abstractions, which I consider this one to be. I like to make abstractions using realism for colors and shapes. Several years ago several of my fruits and vegetable paintings hung in a bookstore for 6 months. Of all the people that saw them, one said to me, "You're really painting abstractions, aren't you." I wanted to know her, but never saw her again. Everybody saw the fruits and vegetables and thought they belonged in the kitchen, but were too big to go in the kitchen. Oh well.



Having some popcorn. It feels like watching a movie. I have liked popcorn at a movie since walking to movies in childhood. Then, popcorn didn't cost $5 or $10. I haven't gone to a theater in so many years, I don't know how much it is. And while going to theaters, it was many a year since I bought popcorn when it started going way-way up. I expect by now it could be $20. Evidently they sell it at those prices. I saw people standing in long lines to pay it. Popcorn and coke filled to the top with ice. Essentially, a coca-cola snow cone to drink with a straw while it melts.



The head in the image above is a likeness of a man I sat with a few hours a week to give round-the-clock caregiver a chance to get out of the house, go to the store, take a nap, whatever. This was with hospice. He was from Dickenson County, Ralph Stanley's home county, in the Clinch Mountains of Southwestern Virginia. He was essentially helpless, needing constant care. Could barely talk. It was with him I saw redneck weddings on Country Music Television. He was pretty far along. The last I heard of him, he was taken to Tennessee to be kept by a relative there. The day after I'd signed the painting using his likeness from a photo I made of him with permission, I learned he died the day before I signed it.



I took an interest in painting a portrait of him the day I saw him looking like a zen monk on a Japanese scroll, the face in lines of black ink on gold scroll. He was wrapped up around his neck by his blanket suggesting a monk's robe. I wanted to make a portrait of him in a way that suggested a Chinese or Japanese scroll portrait of an abbot in times past on a monastery wall. Only suggest. And only suggest to me. I have had in my mind flash cards used in Japan to teach children, a picture of an ear above, and the word below in calligraphy. I used my hand for below, for the calligraphy American style, graffiti. I had thought of using spray to write the words, like graffiti, but I don't have a great deal of control over spray like I have with a brush. So I used stencil as contemporary artless print.



In my western version of the flash card, the calligraphy has its own meaning. His face at rest and lightly painted like a memory becomes the image of other. The hand becomes the image of self. Both are painted using the same colors, white, light purple and light yellow. Other and self are interchangeable. From other's point of view, other is self. It runs both ways at the same time, like a state highway. This is the nature of every relationship, even seeing a dove through the window flying to the bird feeder. This is how we know each other, a play of consciousness. The head without hair is not gender specific. It could be monk or nun. The round face could be Asian or western, the abbot Buddhist or Catholic. Taking an eastern form, I've filled in the blanks with western parts. On such scrolls a poem might be written on a part of it. Other and self is my three-word poem that goes inseparably with the image.



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OTHER AND SELF

 new painting


Above is the new painting. Poor photograph of it, but it gives an idea of the colors, which are like shown above. Attempting to avoid glare I went with too little light and that was not a solution. It has some fairly subtle color differences in the background that are completely left out of the photo, though the subtleties in the colors in head and hand and words made it through ok. I tend to see the head as something vague like a memory, even a symbol of memory, given that we know others in our memories. Someone dead or someone living though not present, both live in the memory. The head is rendered by the artist. The hand is the artist's hand, a print taken directly from the hand 3 times. The head recedes visually, while the hand comes forward visually, like with an outstretched arm between them, the hand saying STOP: Thought Xing. The head in perhaps meditation is thinking. The Old Abbot. He's considering other and self, which, when you get down to it, is every relationship, and ultimately the entire world we live in.



Meher Baba gave me a good one when he said others are God, self is not God. Self is ego. That one stays in the back of my mind floating among other enigmas that I don't quite know what to make of. It felt like I got it automatically the first time I came across it, but when it comes to saying what I got, I'm stumped. Self as ego goes for all the others too, but seen through the self (ego) the others are God. It takes me to when Jesus said, talking to us (others), "ye are gods." His ego was gone, so I take it he spoke not from self, but from other. That's another one like love your neighbor, 2,000 years have passed and we still don't get it. Does that make us something like a coin, a god on one side and ego on the other? Two sides of the same consciousness? Some religions like to call the ego the devil, which I'm ok with when it comes to interpreting what they mean by the devil. Only problem is, people who like to see things in terms of the devil tend to identify others as the devil, when it's self that is the devil. There's where things get all mixed up and Jimmy Swaggart plays sniff without scratching.



I prefer not to put things in terms of the devil and evil. I see too much of people calling themselves Christian, who get fixated on Satan and the Devil and Damnation and agony forever, to the point it becomes the subject of their focus. Entertainers like Ozzy Osborne use the imagery of hell as their projection, and what I see they're about is ego run riot. Like the old feller said, Same differ'nce. Charles Manson, who liked the Satan imagery and lives in prison for being evil and committing evil acts against society, I tend to see an Xtreme ego-maniac without any regard for others (God). Totally involved in self (ego). I won't say anything about the spirit world where there are indeed the dark, evil, hideous spirits, as well as the spirits of light. We're veiled from that world only a shaman has access to, the reason a shaman must be brave as a warrior. In my everyday life, I'd rather look at the difference as self-centered and other-centered. Self-centered behavior takes us to the inner dark, whereas other-centered behavior takes us to the inner light.



The news about Rupert Murdoch is hilarious every day. It's become a serial comedy. Tune in to the news for more laughs. Not only has he learned from Ronald Reagan to keep on pushing for police state and never let up, he's learned from Reagan how to get away with lying under oath, "I don't remember." Visiting my mother a few years ago, I picked up a Reader's Digest I'd not seen in so many years I almost forgot it, flipped through it, looked at the ads and pictures, read titles of articles, started reading one and thought it awfully much a right wing propaganda. Stopped reading it and picked another article. Same thing. I looked in the front and saw Rupert Murdoch owned Readers Digest. I put it down.



He also bought the Village Voice in New York, one of the last little voices of free press in America, to shut it up. For many, many years I've waited, hoping for the day Murdoch would overstep his bounds shutting down free press and replacing it with police state press. Rupert Murdoch is a serious enemy of democracy. Every once in awhile amidst the world news pops up good news. The press about Murdoch now is good news every day. Though he won't suffer any more than inconvenience for the mess he's trying to make of our world, I'm glad to see him at least get flea bit on the ankle. I say glad, because it resembles justice slightly. So many of those people get away with what they do to the rest of us, justice appears much of the time to be on hold for the rich. A poor kid in this county who stole a used tv from a charity for the poor got 2 years in prison, and not tennis camp prison. Going by that system of justice, Murdoch needs his neck put to the chopping block, sent on to his next life as a gypsy girl's baby in Tirana, Albania, living in a train station toilet. Karma rules. Only problem with that solution -- it's a little too messianic. May you be born in a manger! I have to remind myself: look out what you wish for.



I don't look for anything much to come of the present legal ordeals old Murdoch is going through, but inconvenience for the old boy who'd rather be at the club with the other old boys talking about it over drinks. His son is the equal rogue who needs censuring as well. Legal justice seldom touches the mega-rich, meaning I don't expect anything of a legal nature to come of it besides bluster and other people's heads rolling. He's already done so much damage, maybe exposing him at least might keep him from doing more. Maybe this court experience will satisfy his appetite for more.



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OUTTA TOUCH

george segal, parking garage, 1968

On the news at this moment the newscaster is talking about a "heat wave" that's a problem somewhere. I've wondered where the notion came from among people I've seen over the last few days that it's so unbearably hot. To my memory, this is the mildest summer we've had in 25 years at least. My first summers here, 35 years ago, the thermometer touched 90 maybe one day in the summer. About 10 years later it began creeping upward until the hottest day of the year touched 100 several years ago and has done it consistently every year since, except this year. This summer it touched 90 one time. I happened to mention while talking in Selma's that it was a mild summer. Did that ever get a broadside of protest. I was thinking we live in the same place, their temperature has been the same as mine. Now I get it. The news is talking about a heat wave someplace like Texas and people dying. So the people around me in the mildest summer at least of their experiences here are believing it's hotter than it really is because the tv says so. Yesterday, in response to somebody griping about the heat--I'm thinking 80 is not hot--I said, "It's summer," and got called for being a smart-mouth. Again, I remind myself of the power of television.



It made me reflect on the immensity of what I'm not aware of by avoiding television. I don't know the names of any sports stars except, of course, Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods. Don't know of anybody in pop music now except Lady Gaga, and that because she's such a bizarre presence. And enchanting to me like Nina Hagen and Patti Smith were in their time. When I sit in front of a television it's to watch, most often, a foreign film of my choice, and most often made over the last 60 years. I don't keep up with anything new anymore. It has been so long since I've kept up with the new that I'm not even aware of who is a hot dog in the New York art world. When I hear mixes made by young friends on a cd, I hear every variety of rock and roll from rockabilly to Paul Anka to hard-core, even 40s crooning. What's new under the sun? The present moment in rock being a kind of anything-goes market tells me something new is  brewing, a new sound. I've an idea fusion from all over the world is coming into pop music here. New rhythms, new ways of seeing and hearing, putting parts together in new ways.



In the span of time between the dying out of the first surge of rock and roll in America and the "British Invasion," Spencer Davis Group, Dave Clark Five, Rolling Stones, we had a lull in pop music when all kinds of tv pop was played on the radio and the "folk movement," Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, were the beginnings of "underground," in that you had to buy them to hear them. The Brits were livening up the radio again, then Bob Dylan plugged in and created what has been called rock ever since. From then to now, Bob Dylan has been the most amazing human phenomenon of my lifetime, up there with the guy that walked the wire between the World Trade Center towers, Philippe Petite. Bob Dylan is and has been for a long time the Mozart and Shakespeare of songwriting. He has put Cole Porter and Richard Rogers, every songwriter that went before, in the shade. It can be said somebody wrote a great song and somebody else wrote a great song. Then there is Bob Dylan, who has written volumes of great songs, and performed most of them in arrangements that define the songs. He played a harmonica in so distinctively his own sound that no one else can use that sound without sounding like Dylan. To my ear, and to my ear alone, as far as I know, his last 4 albums are his finest to date. Like English playwright Harold Pinter, he waxed better and better in a steady progress. Like a runner from Kenya, the leader of the pack, the one out in front that nobody can catch up with.



I recall the time an aunt who lived in North Palm Beach jumped in my face over the phone because I hadn't heard that Conway Twitty died that day. I've always preferred the Clash to Conway Twitty, the Clash and just about any other band. He never tripped my trigger. He might have if I'd ever paid attention to him, but there are hundreds of bands and singers I'd listen to before Twitty, multiple hundreds. Big deal. According to her, I needed to get out of these mountains and get in the "real" (lol) world where I'll know what's going on. Conway Twitty dying is something going on? Might have been for him, but it was nothing for me. She asked me, confrontationally, if I liked him. I said I don't necessarily like him, but I appreciate him as a musician. Then I was lectured to that I can't appreciate something I don't like. Maybe she can't, but I can. It was more than she could bear that I wasn't upset over Conway Twitty dying. She was getting me upset, but he didn't bother me at all. It was one of those times I wanted to go outside and scream into the center of the bowl of sky overhead, So Fucking What!  Michael Jackson doesn't trip my trigger, either. So what? All it means is I'm not 12.



I couldn't figure out how living on a cul-de-sac in a Florida suburb watching television and listening to country music radio was an example of "in touch" with anything. I'd rather be "in touch" with the people around me, the people I live among, my friends, than anything in the pop world. I see and hear plenty of it, but mostly with indifference. It's rare that I hear a pop song and want to know who did it. When I hear an old-time fiddle tune, or a banjo tune, or a Carter Family song, that's when my ears dance. Right now I have a Friday night source for some of the finest musicians in SW Virginia and NW NC, who blow my mind with their music every Friday night. Live. Small audience of people who know each other. I'd so much rather be "in touch" with the music of Scott Freeman and Willard Gayheart than anything on the radio like Kieth Urban or the Dixie Chicks. I'd rather put on a cd than listen to just about anything on the radio. No XM or any of that radio in the house requiring $20 or so a month. By this time in my life I have cds of all the music I like to listen to, from dance music in Kinshasa to Chicago blues, Taj Mahal, Tibetan nuns, Santana, mountain banjo, and the list goes on so long I can't even start a list. Conway Twitty's name failed to make the list.



Finished a painting today by signing it. I've fussed and fussed with it until I sit and look at it for hours and see nothing else to do. It's complete conceptually and complete visually. It has something of a visual dance. It's night and I can't get a picture without glare. Will get a photograph tomorrow. In original conception, it was a head, a hairless, eyebrowless man's round head. Eyes closed. Initial title was The Old Abbot. The head is the upper half. It is done lightly, almost ghostlike, more like a hologram, though with opaque paint instead of transparent light. Bottom half is a hand print, first time white, then light purple on that and a very pale yellow on top. The same colors used to paint the head. The hand pushes forward boldly while the head fades back a little ways, perhaps an arm's length. A word in stencil spelled vertically to the left of the head, OTHER. Between the head and the hand is the horizontally stenciled word, AND. Then rising from the space between thumb and forefinger the diagonal word, SELF. I'll let you have it from there to make of it what you will. I don't know that my way of seeing it is the only way, so I'd rather let you, like one seeing it on a wall, apply your own meaning. I don't want to limit it to only one meaning. It's not a riddle. It's a visual entertainment only. Any thoughts it might inspire are your own. No test will be given.



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