A SEARCH FOR ORIGINAL SELF

19

Several years ago a friend in Ashe County told me about a psychic in Charlotte, one he believed was the real deal. He suggested we go see her. He'd seen her before, wanted to introduce me to her. I was curious. Upon meeting her, I distrusted her right away, maybe not a fraud, but in it for the ego was what I felt. Still curious, I paid my sixty dollars, feeling like a traveling salesman at Mother Fletcher's Whorehouse. She asked my birth sign. I said, Taurus. I told her at first I was looking for insight into self, looking for who I am. She told me to hold my hands open facing her. She wanted to see the palms. She said aggressively, the way an old aunt would talk, saying when she looks at my hands all she sees is space. She went off, telling me if I'm there about space, she's not into space, I need to go to somebody else. I told her I wasn't there about space, just wanted insight into self, for her to tell me what she sees. After another minor harangue about space, she said, "Who are you?" I said, "That's what I'm here to find out." I've looked at my hands, ever since, and fail to see space. We sat for maybe forty-five minutes. I don't recall what all she said, it's been awhile. I recognized who she was talking about. When she was done, I felt like I was on track with who I am. I asked, "Where am I going?" She said, "You're going home." I thought, what kind of lame answer is that? It's no answer. Said nothing, taking it for a cheap shot. Sounds good, but what does it mean? My mind went to religion, my heavenly home, my home beyond the sky, where I go when I die. I didn't believe that was her meaning. It has stayed with me more than twenty years. I came out of the session not liking her, felt her judgmental as a preacher, which she was. She had a church of her own. I didn't trust that part of her, either. Nonetheless, I remember finding her reading on target. I was no stranger to everything she said, except the space part. It told me she was seeing something. A recollection just now surfaced. She told me my friends pick me up at night while I'm sleeping and take me on rides in the space ship. I about laughed out loud, but didn't want to be disrespectful. Maybe they do.

4

I've wondered about "going home," carried it in the lazily swirling trash bin in the back of my mind where subjects stay alive, and come forward from time to time to be mulled over, chewed. A couple days ago, visiting my neighbor, Allan, we were watching a video of a tv show. I forget the title. A young guy talking to a psychotherapist on a trip of self-discovery talked about going home. I didn't keep up with the show, so I was not sure what he meant. It caught my attention. I took it for him saying that his original self was opening up, he was going home. For the first time, I saw going home as the journey to find one's original self. It turned out he was in LA talking about going home to Alabama for his grandmother's funeral, him seeing the journey a self-discovery odyssey. I was thinking I got it. I got it because I am there or almost there (here). I realized this is what I'm seeing when I've told my friend Carole a few times recently, I feel like I have come into my original self, who I was as a child, who I am and wanted to be. I am now who and what I wanted to be in the earliest years. I wanted to be left alone, left to follow my own interests. Looking back, I went for the education I needed, and headed for the hills. The time in these mountains has been occupied by finding my way home, unveiling original self, one step at a time, becoming who I am. Going home, in this way, has been my purpose all my adult life. I was so twisted up in knots by the time I left parents, the early years on my own were the worst years of my life. This explains absence of interest in a career and why I've given my life to learning, learning the principles of heaven and earth. It also explains why the Tao te Ching is my personal scripture. The Tao is the Way, the path to self-knowledge. 

20

It would be foolish to say I feel like I found enlightenment. It is a minor enlightenment, a step along the path. Perhaps crossing a mountain range, getting a good look around that feels like I've come into something important. I do feel like I have found my home within. Art projects over the last year are coming more from who I am than ever before. All the way along with painting, I felt like I was learning to paint. There came a time I felt like I knew how to paint. Then it had no more interest. I felt like my figurative painting was cartoons, painting inside the lines. Tired of inside the lines, I set out to leave the lines altogether. Use only one color. Simple. Once an idea for something new takes a turn to the complex, I pull back and remind self it's about simple, the most simple, simple as a line of string. I've picked up things for possible future art projects, so many by now, the house is cluttered with found items. It is time now to use found materials from the collection all over the house. The paint I have is the paint I'll use, buying only white and black, because I use so much white especially. Using what I have, my own resources, putting found things together into completions I am happy with as art objects, I've found home in my art expression. In this sense, too, I feel like I have come home to true self. These objects I've been putting together over the last year come from my innermost self. In this time of the life, I am where I want to be geographically and within. How I got here, I can't name, unless it would be God's grace. It was not from my own decision making. I cannot say it was of my own doing, except aiming self in such direction, unconcerned that it will not make me money, actually makes me even more unfit to make money. Maybe it had to do with getting out of the way and letting the spirit flow as it will, allowing others to be who they are.

14

Yesterday I put together the pieces of the latest art project, a cedar board in the house at least ten years, 25 inches long and 9 inches wide. Looks like 5/8 inch thick. A crack ran through the center of it. Years ago I glued braces to the back to hold it together. It has been leaning against a bookshelf, in sight all the time, at least a year. I've studied it, considered what to do with it, leaning toward maintaining the integrity of the wood itself, too beautiful to cover with paint. A time came I saw it desert sand, the crack the horizon line. Thought about making a stain of blue oil paint and staining one half of it sky blue. Thought about making a line of tiny donkeys a half inch long walking along the horizon line. Way too corny. A Fifties movie poster. Bad, bad, bad. Rethink. I'd been recently searching for compositions using triangles. Rectangles and circles are easy. It turns out a triangle is a challenge. During this time of considering triangles, I saw a photograph of punk rocker Richard Hell onstage wearing a tshirt with fifteen or twenty outlines of triangles, all the same size, scattered as if dropped randomly onto the surface. I thought it a successful image made of only triangles. The image widened my scope of thinking about triangles. One day, looking at the cedar board with the crack the horizon line, I saw the Giza pyramids triangles sticking up from behind the horizon line of North African dunes. A triangle project. This was the moment I picked up the sandpaper and went to sanding. Did not want to use the electric sander. They make tiny circles. The board finished would have little circles all over it. I sanded it by hand going with the grain. Three sheets of coarse and one of fine, then steel wool. All the time sanding, I dreaded applying any kind of color on the beautiful wood and threw out the blue from my mind's eye. All sand. Made a mosaic of six triangles to fit together to make three pyramids. Raw cardboard on raw wood. The cardboard received two coats of clear spray paint to elongate preservation. Glued them into place. Have now put the second coat of tung oil on the board, a coat a day, three or four times. Calling it Red Desert after the Antonioni film. The only connection with the film is the title. A composition in triangles.  

 red desert

21

all images by tj worthington

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THE MAKING OF NUMBER ELEVEN

#11 in progress

Earlier today I launched into bringing #11 to completion. The plywood is 4 inches by 30 inches, hangs vertically. Here it is with cardboard glued in place, the whole gessoed and the edge painted black with some fast-drying paint made for painting furniture. True to the rule of thumb in this series, the board was found as it is. The cardboard was found. I mixed an orange that turns out to be BIC lighter orange, a bit stronger orange than sherbet. It's a light orange that is not pastel. I glued a strip of fir to the back of the plywood for a brace to keep it from warping. I mixed the orange I wanted in a styrofoam bowl with medium by palette knife. It feels like kneading clay, preparing it for the potter's wheel; smooth out all the lumps, work it until it is smooth and consistent throughout. I pick up a glob of it with the palette knife and slather it onto the form. This is my favorite part. All that goes before is like setting the stage. When I lay on the paint, the concert is on. Applying the paint is where I sail. I hesitate to use a palette knife for the tendency to want to make pretty swipes with it and make interesting patterns. I'm not one who likes a painting made with palette knife, unless it's an abstraction. I wanted the thickness of paint that needed to be put on by palette knife. I lay the paint on as it happens, sole purpose to cover up all the white and distribute the paint more or less the same all over, letting the strokes be a record of the process of spreading the paint. I make it a point to avoid aesthetic considerations smearing on the paint. I wanted it to look as rough as a stuccoed wall without mind arranging patterns, no matter how loose. Random. Mind contributes the cardboard's shape and place, color too.  

#11 in progress

Bypassing mind is one aspect of making an art object important to me. In the time of doing figurative painting, I felt like it was all mind, staying inside the lines. Capturing a likeness and creating a feeling are fun projects in themselves. Living rurally, there is not much of an art market around here but for landscape prints in cheap frames from Walmart. I paint for the people of my world, the mountain people. They can't afford to buy paintings, so I don't sell paintings. I tried big city gallery once and that was enough. I'd rather sell things to my friends for prices they can easily afford than drive back and forth to a city to deliver and attend special occasion "parties," where I'm expected to suck up to the rich and sell myself as a cool dude who knows Art, a good investment. I'm not cool and I don't know how to impress somebody with my approach to art. I don't even want rich people or corporate offices to have my work. I dislike intensely the role of token artist at a dinner party or cocktail party of the rich. I've never been able to learn how to run my mouth and spontaneously be able to say nothing at all in a continuous stream of words. A day came very soon after stepping into that world, I had to get with self, break through denials and admit I despise this shit. I've reminded self several times that my purpose applying pigment to surface is not to be invited to cocktail parties where I might meet somebody new to impress with me as somebody special. I always return to, I'm just a Joe. In my private mind, TJ stands for The Joe, nobody special, one with all of humanity, not an exception. And Joe is WW2 slang for American. I take it for the name of Everyman. 

#11 done

Because I'm not career minded, or attention minded, about my painting, I've been free to do what I feel like doing and let other considerations go. It doesn't mean I'm a creative genius, because I am not. I'm an art minded individual in a world where art has no place. The interest of the rich in art is more about investment than the art itself. I'm not even sure if anything I have done and am doing now could be called art. Recalling a conversation with pencil artist and friend, Willard Gayheart, of Woodlawn, Virginia, Willard said, "I'm not really an artist." This is someone who also plays rhythm guitar as a master, bluegrass, old-time and country, and he sings, knowing the words to a long list of songs. He has written several really good songs he's recorded over a a period of forty years. I said, "You are, indeed an artist. If anybody is an artist, you are." I felt like he had an elevated idea of artist, so elevated it was beyond this world, where only a gifted few have access to it. In my way of seeing, art is about this world, the world of duality, of humanity. Art is one of the many talents we humans are born with, a form of expression from who-you-are. Hank Williams is singing in my mind, calling me to see the artist in him. And when my money's all gone, I'm on the telephone, saying, hey, hey mama, can your daddy come home? An artist wrote and performed those words. A couple of lines stay with me from the Stones, She drove a pickup truck painted green and blue....she's going back to Baltimore, she sings there in a bar. An artist wrote these lines, and again, an artist performed them. A woman I know has spent her life working full time, home manager, wife, mother, who, in her quiet times, made drawings of her own visual preference and never thought of them as art. But they are. Dadaist Sophie Tauber had a similar vision in 1915, and Bauhaus later, that Anne did not know about. 

#11

The physical need to make images o'ertook me at the age of 40. I started, wanting to use drawing as a meditation. It took hold of me as a fascination. A time came when I'd been told I'm as good as Norman Rockwell the last time. That was not my goal. I'd rather be like Mr Rogers than Norman Rockwell. I stopped for several years. One day I was inspired to take up oil paint. I wanted to paint round things. Given that a canvas is square or rectangular, I wanted to balance the straight lines with curves. Yin and yang. Stopped again for a number of years and took it up again painting portraits of mountain musicians. That came to an end a few years ago when I couldn't paint inside the lines any longer. I felt from the start that I was teaching myself to paint, step by step, with reaching toward abstraction the goal. Since I've started up again, I want to make these "single color abstractions" the only thing I can think of to call them that is accurate. It turns out the piece of cardboard becomes the subject. The first two had two colors each. Using two colors was original vision, but I preferred one color. Suddenly, a whole cosmos of what I could do with cardboard and one color opened up before my mind's eye. I wanted something totally mine I'd never seen before. Surely, somebody somewhere has done this, maybe in Italy in the time of Arte Povera. That I don't know about it makes this theme mine. Even if I were to find that somebody has done it before, it's still mine. Nonetheless, I date the influence back an entire century. I don't see it as NEW to world of contemporary art. What I'm doing goes back a century. It has come out of what I've learned paying attention to the art of the last century as it has evolved unto today. I feel like I have come into something I've been working toward in the super-conscious from the beginning. It surfaced like a slow-rising bubble from the ocean floor.  

#12 color yet to be determined

LEARNING TO PLAY

A new project is taking me into a new place with cardboard and wood. This one is four sides instead of just one side. It is eight and a half inches tall and five and a half inches each side. This block of wood has been in the house for several years. I found someplace and kept it with the some-day-I'm-gonna collection of found things I'm looking to use up before my last day. I don't want who cleans up after me to throw them away. I have feeling for the beauty in each object such that now I want all my future art objects to be made from the found things. The plywood pieces I'm gluing cardboard to are pieces I've found over the years with a mind to painting on them. The cardboard is found too. I'm surprised at how many I have, and continue to find more. I had in mind I wanted to make a few small ones too. I found two small pieces in the house among the collection. This block of wood I'm working on now has been here possibly fifteen years. Its dry. It was excess, cut off the end of a six by six found I have no recollection where. It was aged when found. I have no concern about it drying further and developing new cracks. It has cracks from drying out, which is ok. I don't want cracks to occur after the project is finished. I've made a base for it to stand on from a block of wood five and a half by five and a half, an inch and a half thick. On top of it sits another block of wood an inch and a half thick, three and a half by three and a half inches. Both blocks of wood I found the exact size they are, at different times. They fit as if I'd cut them to size. The two blocks are held together by wooden pegs. The big block of wood will be fixed to the base by two wooden pegs. I'm looking at painting the base black. The big block I aim to paint a deep dark red not quite maroon; red enough it will be seen as red.  

Red is a color I have shied away from in the past, though now I want to make some beautiful red things. Red has moved in on me. I like red now like never before. I've always liked red, but never wanted to use it much. It seemed like an arrogant color in the past. It doesn't seem like that at all now. Possibly some years of seeing Chinese films, reading Chinese fiction and history, paying attention to contemporary Chinese art, I've learned an appreciation for red. Red is as important a color in China as the color combo red-white-and-blue is in USA. Red goes all the way back in the Chinese aesthetic. I tend now to associate the color red with Chinese art, an Eastern aesthetic. I already have a Western aesthetic by a lifetime of influences from European and American traditions, all of it based in Christendom. The Eastern is based in Buddhism. I see the two religions the same as they teach the same universal truths. Only the different cultures they represent make them different. At the core, they are the very same. I tend to see everything outside the core superficial. Only the core matters to me. I could go from one religion to another with no more problem than a Methodist visiting a Presbyterian church. I could go to a Buddhist temple and pray with others there, the same as I can go into a Muslim mosque, pray with the worshipers there and feel at home. Hindu is a beautiful religion, but there, again, only the core is of interest to me. I'd be interested to learn about the various gods and goddesses and the texts, though with the same interest as I'd read a history of India. My personal preference is to have it as I have it now. No religion. Only the core. I live with that core, the core that is the same in every living being. It is the very deepest part of who I am; it is my consciousness, the self who sees my dreams. I carry that core with me wherever I go, even to the liquor store. Like the Rastafarians say, I am I. 

That's where red takes me now, to balance of east and west in myself. One of the aspects of what I'm doing now that excites me is I see the Eastern aesthetic blended with the Western. That I'm doing single colors now is Eastern as it can be; Chinese, Japanese, Korean. It's also Western, particularly American. Everything I've done heretofore has been totally Western to my eye. I've wanted to get the east-west balance in my painting, but was not satisfied I had. Because I didn't have a warehouse to keep unsold paintings, I felt it important to paint for the people of the world I live in, rural Americans, Appalachian Americans. About ten years of portraits of mountain musicians. It came to feel like coloring books, keeping it inside the lines. I wanted to reach into the abstract in a way that the simplicity itself is what's abstract about it. On the plane of one color, the raised cardboard surface becomes subject, or positive space, while that around it becomes negative space, in one color. If the light is coming from above right, the light makes a light line along the right side and upper line of the rectangle, and shadow on the left side and lower side, two sides light and two sides shadow articulate the rectangle. For me, that line is the subject. This block of wood will have some interesting lines on it. I'm loving playing with a four-sided version of what I've been playing with on a flat surface. This feels like the first time I have felt like my art projects were playing. I feel like I'm making music finally. All the way along, it felt like every phase I went through was a leap beyond the last one, each one a stair-step process of learning by doing. It's like I've been learning chords, songs, techniques, the art of making music. Suddenly it all came together, ceased to be work and learning. Now I'm playing.

  

I have relaxed. I wanted to make something of my own aesthetic that is no one else's. To get there, I threw off thoughts of selling. I don't care if somebody likes it and don't care if somebody doesn't like it. I'm reaching inside self to find my own aesthetic without interest to please anyone outside myself. I was looking for something wholly my own. It started with a simple design that went simpler and simpler. I want to shave the object down to its own core. Like I don't want any kind of dogma to sour my faith, I don't want anything in my art object but its core self. I like using paint for color and for its textures. Putting the two levels of the base together with pegs, I used the smaller block to drill holes in first and use it to guide the drill bit for the peg holes in the larger block and in the bottom of the big block of wood. I was pleased with myself for doing it so accurately. I measured and drew lines, had it just right. The big block sat on the base at about a thirty degree angle off from what I'd planned. It's crooked. I have not been able to figure out how it happened. It's simply how it is. Everything about it looks right, but it's way off from what I saw initially. However, I want chance to have a role in everything I do. I read this as a chance occurrence out of my control. I received it as Divine intervention and said, Thank you. It makes everything just a bit askew, suggests the big block is turning on a pivot, gives a retinal sense of motion, gives it lightness. I like it. I thought for a split-second of drilling new holes, and said, no-no-no. I must receive the touch of the Divine when it is given. My mind is still unable to figure out what happened. It will look so much better. It will look like I meant it. The element of play is now established in it. The corners lined up, it would have looked like a wooden soldier. Now it is a dancer. 

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PRETEND AND THE EGO

Something is changing on the inside again. My painting has changed radically in the snap of a finger. Haven't painted in a couple years. The zeal just fell away. Every time I take a break for a few years, which always occurs from boredom doing the same thing over and over, I take up painting in an altogether different manner from before. I've made a leap from figurative to abstract, minimalist. I decided to put out of my mind all thought of selling, thoughts of naming. I wanted to find my own aesthetic without regard for what might sell. I took the punk path. I want to express my own aesthetic. To express it, I needed to find it. I wanted to make something totally mine, according to my own visual aesthetic, without regard for anyone else liking it or not liking it. Minimalism is my favorite period of the Modern era, abstract expressionism too. My art aesthetic is particularly American. Now that I have found my own sense of self-expression that is for myself alone with no ambition to sell, it quite naturally falls into the minimal and the abstract. Something like the place Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly fell in between the two. Each one of the new pieces I find I love more than anything I've done before. There was a time I wanted to do figurative and loved it while doing it, but they didn't quite satisfy what I really wanted to do, abstraction of some sort. I'd thought about selling things before, making them accessible to the people I live among, considering my environment is not urban, but rural, where individuals matter. I wanted to make portraits of individuals, particular individuals, people I know. I only painted people I know. 

7

Now, I don't want to spend so much time painting details. I prepare the surface, then slather on the paint like stucco, one color with palette knife. I like it. It pleases what I want of a work of art. I've actually adopted the punk sensibility into my painting. Punk is doing what you want to do that is your own individual expression, explaining the varieties of hair colors and styles of apparel on punkers. Punk's philosophy is be who you are. Punk as a style has been going on forty years. It was 1975 that I heard my first punk album, Patti Smith's Horses. The show I saw in Charlotte around a month ago of five hard core punk bands lit up my love for punk rock, punk attitude. I've come into a place where I only want to be around people I connect with. I saw a film this afternoon, a documentary about punk graffiti artists who evolved into galleries and museums. It was called Beautiful Losers. Punk attitude ran through everybody featured in the film. I felt I connected with the different artists, with what they were doing. I felt aesthetically free. I loved my new direction with paint all the more. In a way, they were doing what I am doing, just totally different. Also in this time, I'm finding less tolerance for the fake and don't care to be around fake people anymore. What do I mean by fake people? The climbers, the people who see themselves in terms of the asset hierarchy, people whose center is in money and the appearance of money, fickle, people whose identity is in appearance. People a good first impression is important to. They're always disappointments later. They make a pretty package, but when you look inside, it's empty. 

It feels like I'm shifting gears again, turning away from some and towards others. I am letting go of the people I am expected to be cool around. Gotta act cool. Talk cool. Be acceptable. Conform to the social standard of appearance. When Vada is in my life, I don't need somebody around who keeps track of my cool quotient. With Crystal and Justin, I don't have to perform. With other friends, Melvin, Harry, Ross and Zack, Lynn, Carole, Donna, Milly, there is no judgment going on. We all receive each other as we are, dark side with the light side. I'm moving away from people I cannot talk freely with, people I feel the need to self-edit for. Five years of writing these almost-daily journal entries brought me into closer touch with self, better understanding. The writing has become a meditation. I speak freely here, considering whoever looks at it is free to read it or not to read it. When somebody doesn't like what I write, they're free to stop. I've begun to feel that way around others. They're free to pay me no mind. And I'm free to get up and go. It has not always been like this. There was a time I believed it was necessary to make a good impression, conform to the code. Always in uncertainty. Am I cool enough? Am I dressed right? Yesterday's experience with a positive thinking tron showed me the difference between how I am now and used to be in the not very distant past. Then, I'd have tried to show I think positive too, that I'm really a nice guy, know not to say taboo words, a sensitive New Age guy. Now, I am overtaken by an itch to get out of there, away. Instead of unsuccessfully attempting to rescue a dead conversation of niceties that went nowhere, I let it go and ran. By now I've learned that when a song starts out bad, it's not going to get better. 

I feel freer talking with people I don't know than ever before, even freer talking with people I know. Something else that changed recently is tolerance for the fake, for PC. I'm free now when the fake comes up to say to self, I don't need this, and get out of it. I'll stay away from the coffee shop, the vortex of white middle-class pretend. Any way I look at it, there is not a lot of time ahead for this lifetime. I am more jealous of my time than ever before. I don't have time for pretend. Balance is what I'm seeking now. The balance of opposites in duality. Looking at balance, the bad balances the good. Good is not the spiritual path. The good must be balanced by the bad. Acting sweet all the time is not spiritual. Being nice all the time is not spiritual. I'll define what I mean by good and bad. We call it good behavior when the karmic return is to our liking. We call it bad when the return is not to our liking. Pretending to act without ego motivation just backs the ego up like a lake behind a dam, makes it into a powerful force. I am not free of ego, nor was meant to be. I feel like, for balance, it's best to let the ego have its way, its say, in moderation, controlled, not suppressed. Diminishing the ego is the Master's role, not mine. Mine is to live with it, work with it, not against it. Meher Baba said our ego is our ballast, the rocks kept in the bottom of sailing ships for weight to keep the ships upright. The ego keeps us upright in this world of duality where every kind of challenge awaits us, emotional storms, uncontrollable storms bigger than us that come by surprise. I'm zooming in on the shift I'm feeling within having to do with ego. I've been feeling strong ego need for expression over the last few weeks. I don't try to stop it or slow it down. I let it flow, while paying attention, directing it to something constructive or creative if I'm able. I like to get to know my ego. My goal is to mindfully direct the ego rather than let the ego direct me. 

photos by tj worthington

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IT EXISTS FOR ITSELF

air bellows outdoor art museum

My automatic pilot has been set on slow today. Real slow. Unto stopped. Started out getting a few things done, like preparing two new surfaces with gesso toward painting, and viewing videos from the Hillbilly Show toward putting them together in sequence. Like everything else in my life, I'm proceeding not knowing what I'm doing. An artist friend from the past told me he liked about painting that every painting is fresh, he's never done it before. Every painting is first time. Always starting from inexperience. Figuring everything out along the way, a step at a time. It's constant learning that doesn't seem like learning. It's learning by doing, by experience, the best teacher. I like that about making art objects, too. I'm working on a series of abstract, single color surfaces using plywood with a piece of corrugated cardboard glued to it, the whole surface one color. A little earlier, I mixed a color I like for the next one, a kind of rust color. If I were giving them titles, I'd call it Entropy. I'll number them rather than name them. I don't want to make up names for them, like Marakesh, something that sounds pretty and has zero connection to the piece. I'd rather number them as completed and let the number be the name. I don't like Untitled for a title, either. Numbers are good. The word Seven for a title of something unnameable beats calling it Portofino, something exotic. The number has relevance to the piece in its order. I want to see the progression from one piece to the next and see after twenty how they have changed, each one a step along the way of changes from one to the next. 

5 by tj worthington

I like painting like this. It is akin to painting by not painting. I was feeling like figurative painting was like coloring books, painting inside the lines. I live in a place where there is no art market. No matter how nicely I try to make a painting, it only exists for itself. That's cool. I'm happy with that. Since this is the case, the painting only exists for itself, then I want to paint in a way there is no chance anybody will buy anything, even at yard sale prices. Wouldn't want one on their wall. At least in this time, I want my paintings to have no interest outside myself. I don't want them taken seriously. I want to do what I want to do right now, totally without regard for even feedback. I've become enchanted with a single color slathered on with a palette knife in random swipes of the blade leaving no patterns. The only pattern is the shape of the the plywood, so far rectangular, and the shape of the cardboard glued to the board, so far rectangular in different sizes. The raised cardboard piece takes a life of its own, a line of light around two sides and a line of shadow around the other two sides. A rectangle of light and shadow framing the painted cardboard that becomes a subject just by the association of being framed. I like the surface of corrugated cardboard too. I lay the paint on thick, use a large amount of paint, slashing strokes of the palette knife all over it, spreading the paint with only purpose being covering the gessoed surface without aesthetic consideration. One progression I'm seeing already, the first ones were done in basic colors, and quickly changed to mixed colors. I found a rust color today and will apply rust color to the next one I lay the paint on tomorrow. They're about color. I search until I find a color I love. That will be the next one. 

6 by tj worthington

Perhaps I might have made this leap out of everything I'd done before, that's for sale into making things I don't want to sell. When I do a show of them, they'll all be NFS, not for sale. That eliminates thinking up prices for them. Or maybe I could do something radical like put ten dollars on each one. Wouldn't that be a riot. Some actually might sell. And all the artists around would hate me for setting a new low standard. If I want to get rid of them, I might do that. And I might not want to get rid of them. Might want to hang onto them, keep the series as a unit. That's kind of high sounding. I don't want to do that. I haven't even finished the series, so I'm not even going to conjecture what to do with them. Their purpose is to make works to my aesthetic satisfaction with intent that only a few will like them and of these few, none will buy one. I may have found it. Totally private painting, something I want to do that turns me on, and me only. Surely they will resonate with a few others, and that's how I would want it. NFS eliminates the aggressive statement as question: You want money for that? No I don't want money for it. I want it to exist as itself, something I made for myself that suits my aesthetic sense without regard for anyone else's. It's the only way I can find my own aesthetic expression. All that went before led, like stepping stones, to this place. I don't like the art market world. I am looking for my own aesthetic vision independent of marketing values, independent of expectation, independent of it being called a piece of shit. This is the most freeing approach I've found working visually. I've let the belief I needed to sell things hold me back from doing what is happening now. That's ok. Everything in its time. Now is the time for painting totally for my own eye. 

4 by tj worthington

I have found great freedom in writing by keeping this almost-daily journal as blog going without regard for market, for selling it, for hoping to make money. It is for itself. It, too, exists for itself. I feel like my life exists for itself, is not about money. Seems like my visual aesthetic expression is best and freest done when no money is in the purpose, even anti-money the purpose. I see in the mind's eye the Air Bellows Outdoor Art Museum, the tunnel that goes under the Blue Ridge Parkway at the end of Air Bellows Gap Road. Completely free expression for the teens in the county who want to do some spray can graffiti art someplace. It has been several years of layer upon layer of new additions sprayed on top of what's already there. It has become a beautiful experience to drive through. I creep through, looking at both sides. I love about it that it has no single mind creating it. It is multiple mind input, spontaneous markings saying, I-was-here, hundreds of them sprayed on the collage of other people's markings made without aesthetic regard, random colors and lines covering every square inch of the surface. I see unselfconscious random splatterings. A conscious mind applying each color and line, while the whole has no theme but the individual markings made without regard for others around or under them. A totally receptive surface. It just happens as it happens. Every drive through it, I discover new shapes and lines in new colors. The only art gallery in the area and it new every time, changing, growing, organic, just one mile from where I sit. I like where my visual art is going with no intent to sell. I like writing almost daily with none of my motivation being money or to get ahead.   

air bellows outdoor museum of art

photos by tj worthington

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MEDITATIONS ON THE BOX IN THE WOODS

Thinking about going back to finish the deer blind Monday and help Justin mount the door. He made a frame at home of 2x4s, measured to a perfect fit, and put a piece of 5/8 inch plywood on the frame. He will have the hinges in place, everything ready to go. It will take however many screws to fix the hinges to the wall, placed with that wonderful invention the cordless drill. Zip. Done. No more wrenching a screw with a screwdriver. I saw the finished door yesterday when I went to the house to see the race. He explained the process. He made it a point to buy warped wood that costs less. He knows how to take the warp out of the wood. The 2x4s have a warp and the plywood has a warp. He said it was a bitch. He opposed the warps, put them together warping away from each other. He runs the screws in from the end where they match and gradually screws the opposing warps together along the length of the frame. Held by wood screws, the warps will gradually even out. He said it will be wet after a rain, and when it dries, the wood will dry to the new shape. It has rained all day today, light sprinkles on and off, after a true thunderstorm yesterday of torrential rain, lightning flashing and booming thunder. The weather forecast looks like rain all week. May have to wait til next week to finish the exterior painting. I'd rather finish it on the same wave of energy I painted the whole with. Which, however, amounts to druthers, and druthers don't always get priority. It's one of them it-is-what-it-is kinda things. 

I told Justin the opportunity to paint a cube in the woods, a wrap-around mural of trees, is one of the great moments of my life. Whoever heard of painting trees on a cube in the woods? At one point I made what to my aesthetic eye was a major mistake. I thought: how many art critics are going to be by here in the course of a year? Only two. Me and Lucas. At the same time, it happened outside my conscious mind. My conscious mind knows better, but I did it anyway in a moment of saying no to conscious mind for aesthetic considerations. You might say, it just happened. Because it just happened, I trusted it. I wanted to change it, but it was too pure, too spontaneous a moment to erase. I'm having a hard time starting to tell it, ashamed in a way that I did something so radically against my aesthetic sense, and see at the same time it is actually quite wonderful. Standing on the ladder painting trees on the side with the openings for shooting, I painted a tree coming out of the top of the vertical rectangle, and continued the tree down below, running a tree right up the middle of the scene. I knew better than to do that. Totally knew better. Yet my hand ran the brush in a straight line above and below. I said to self while doing it, this is really stupid. I asked self, How many art critics will see it? Me! I messed it up. I could have painted over it, but chose not to. It simply came too spontaneously and against my conscious will to ignore it. I chose to let it be. Turns out, it's a little bit spooky, woo-woo, or what have you. Every time I stepped out away from the cube to look at it from afar, I only saw that straight line running up the middle. I sighed acceptance like the art director did it and I have to accept it. I kept it to myself, telling self I'm the only one who will notice and I accept it as what happened at the moment, actually held it as a kind of special moment, a living moment, almost sacred because it came so from outside my conscious mind. All the rest of it was mind with a line of beyond-mind interjected. I came to where I liked it for its not-mind quality.

Later, at home putting the camera chip into the computer, I saw it when this image came up full screen. The cross. I about wept. I wondered what the cross was about. Justin will be shooting from the cross. It came to me the cross is a prayer that goes with each projectile for the soul of the being whose life it ends. For myself, I have issues with killing. I really don't like to do it. But that is for myself alone. I'm not a missionary, so I have no desire or impulse to advise someone else about something I hold for myself. It seems a little creepy to me to hunt from a pillbox like in WW2. It seems a bit impure. So what. The Daniel Boone ways of hunting are over. This is a time when hunters have full-time jobs, families, houses, vehicles to maintain, less and less space for hunting every year as new people come in and don't want people hunting. I'm glad to help Justin make his deer blind; I appreciate his skill and conscientious attitude toward killing. He likes to go straight to the heart in one shot, so the buck's knees give out and it drops straight down. It feels nothing. Suddenly falls asleep. No fear, no adrenaline coursing through its veins. I appreciate that in who Justin is. Hunting is about deception. The wild animals are hyper-alert, requiring a clever mind to outwit them. A box in the woods, a bait pile of apples and corn, a trail-camera strapped to a tree to time when the buck you're looking for passes through, hunting as it's done today. I'm glad Justin has a hunting territory he can call his own. The land the box is on belongs to my friends, Lucas and Judy. Justin does maintenance work on the house and does some weed-eating around. They have six acres. Justin has six adjoining acres of woods, giving him twelve acres to hunt. He has been one of the great friends of my life. I'm grateful to have a part in arranging for him a good hunting place.    
   

Vada is three. She will probably get her first buck next year.with a rifle. Daddy will take her with him at least a few times this year. In his design of the box, he made it big enough that he could stretch out in a sleeping bag and Crystal and Vada can sleep on the floor too. Crystal is a hunter. I applaud the good training in taking his baby along. He can teach her the importance of being quiet, of being still, of waiting. I can't think of better training for a three and four year old than being still for long stretches of time with purpose. Vada will be one of the kids who gets her picture in the paper with a buck she killed pre-school. The kid has incredible intelligence. She'll make a good hunter. She'll be a babe hunter in her teens. The guys at school who are hunters will be her friends. She'll be safe among them by way of respect. They'll know she can handle a firearm, and one thing they'll know for sure: her daddy will stomp a mud hole in their ass and walk it dry. She will be able to fight any of them and kick many of their asses. And she'll still be a babe. Probably only older girls will be able to take her down in a fight. By the way, country kids still fight. They all survive it. Parents don't sue other parents over their kids fighting. Here, when a boy turns up at home with his face banged up, his daddy might say, Did you kick his ass? Instead of grounding him for a month. He might ground the kid if he failed to kick the other kid's ass. Country people know how that behavior works among kids. The thing daddy's understand that mommies don't seem to get is that two boys mad each other get into a fight and try to hurt each other, after which they're best friends. I was never a fighter and see no glory in it whatsoever. I bring this up by way of saying I'm in full acceptance of Justin liking to do what he likes to do. I like to do what I like to do. Why shouldn't he? I don't like to kill things. He does. So what? He's feeding a family. I'm not. I'm satisfied with a can of tuna from the grocery store, which comes from a far more questionable source than arrows from a box in the woods.

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THE LITTLE BLACK BOX IN THE WOODS

the trees

Two days of climbing up and down a ladder and carrying the ladder, standing on the ladder reaching overhead with the paintbrush; a spider suddenly rappelled from a corner the brush approached, a controlled fall all the way to the soft ground. A few granddaddy-longlegs lost their homes, and one, alas, lost its life. It was hiding from the brush and I didn't see it until it was too late. I had to flick him off the paintbrush. A tiny blue dot sailed through the air and stuck to a chartreuse fern, quickly suffocated by the layer of fast-drying paint. A sentient being. I write it off to the modern world where a bug suddenly covered by paint is the equal of roadkill. I don't think karma had a great deal to do with the bug's surprise demise. Shit happens. Or, another way of looking at it, I was instrumental in advancing the bug's soul on to its next lifetime as possibly a bug with wings or a spider that makes webs. Say a prayer for its soul and keep on working the paintbrush was all I could do. Some people think I'm nutty saying a prayer for roadkill, albeit silent and maybe a second or two in mental space, but I don't care. They don't see what I see. I see a living consciousness, a sentient being, the same as a human, though less experience, a life form with as much right to live as I assume for myself. Whatever evidence I may give for why I believe I have a right to live would apply to the granddaddy-longleg to the same degree as it would to me. This is why I cannot kill bugs indiscriminately. I've killed plenty and may kill one inside ten minutes, but as a rule of thumb I prefer to allow them their lives. Cheyanne, 7,  asked me last week why I didn't kill the spider I picked up on a a piece of paper and carried outside to release on some foliage. "Why didn't you kill it?" with puzzlement all over her face, in her eyes, even the angle of her head. I realized she'd never seen anybody not kill a spider. I said, "I don't have to kill something just because it's living."  

the sides of the box

Upon arrival at the painting site this morning, I broke a dead branch off a small locust beside the door to the little black room. It shook loose a white luna moth from someplace on the trunk out of my sight. The moth fluttered to the ground like a broken bird onto water, then trying to swim with its wings, flopping over the ground like I had broken one of them. It kept on flopping until it lifted into the air and flew in a half circle through the trees following the open spaces between trees until it went out of sight. It looked like a white bird. I made a note to self this is a special moment. It flew like a butterfly though with purpose like a bird. Opening the paint cans from the day before brought to my attention how tired I was. I was wired, however, wanting to get at slashing the paint. Today would be the day to dive into the painting. Yesterday I laid on the background colors and started the trees, putting them in place. Today I painted the trees. Justin arrived soon after I started. He saw I'd painted it all the way around with trees and said, "About done?" I laughed, "About to start. This is the starting place." I realized yesterday I was painting it as I make a painting. I'll paint the whole thing once, then paint the whole thing again, and again until it satisfies what I'm looking for. I like to build layers upon layers, allowing the under color exposure. I repainted what I'd done yesterday, made the first round. Then made a third round. I thought about making a fourth round, but that meant more hours on the ladder. I felt that was over the line into too much. Two days of stair-step exercise on a step ladder is not a good advertisement for doing it a third day. The third round, I made the white highlights, muted places too bright, darkened places that needed it, articulating the trees a bit better than yesterday's outlines. The third round I brought it to completion, making it a continuum all the way around. Whatever else I felt I'd like to do would be too much and invite more, when my control is less.  

the ground

The colors I had access to were forest green, very dark brown, light blue, light gray and white. They were left-over cans from Justin's house painting jobs. Like me, he's unable to throw away a half gallon of good paint. On my projects, I'm a believer in make do with what you got. I didn't even entertain a thought of saying I need this or that. These are the colors we have; these are the colors we use. I used a three-inch brush for the shades of brown, a three-inch brush for the green and a one-inch brush for the white. I painted it for winter trees as winter is hunting season. I could have put green traces in the trees, but the green I had was rhododendron green, not tree leaf green. Justin told me yesterday about an experiment some guys made for a hunting channel on tv. They painted a blind different colors, including camouflage. They found the deer were as comfortable with the one painted neon pink as the one painted cammo. Before we started, we knew that it didn't matter what we painted on it. I could make the whole thing a wrap-around sign saying EAT MORE POSSUM, red letters on yellow, and it would be the same to the deer as a woodland scene. I knew before starting I was not going to attempt to make it mirror the scenes around it. I chose to work with the space the trees occupied, the trees among one another. I could have gone over it with some darker brown to contrast with the white highlights for depth and dazzle, but liked the softness of it. From a little bit of distance it looks like an outhouse made of used wood. There comes a place in everything I've painted, looking for the next thing to do, when the only thing I can see to do next would mess it up, I know it's done. 

justin sawing a side opening

the saw

grumpy old bastard high on a ladder

Justin had to go away for awhile. When he returned I'd just completed what I was doing for the day. Monday he will put up the door he's making at home, and I'll paint it. I'm saving the finishing touch on that side for the door to fit the vacancy. I want to finish the door and the wall beside it together to make a continuum. If I'd finished the wall, then tried to match it painting the door, it would not work. Justin came driving up the car path surprised by what he saw. He said, "I wasn't expectin nothin like this." We'd already talked over what we're doing is for fun, not to reproduce the woods, not to fool the deer into thinking it's not a box. It was pretty basic before he left. I'd made the third round adding highlights, muting here, brightening there, gave it a little breath of life. I didn't want any more than that. I was aiming toward a feeling that the trees are trees in the woods, living trees. I didn't differentiate locust, maple, poplar, oak, sassafras, Didn't want to mirror the forest, but to feel the forest, pay close attention to arrangements and space between them. I wanted a sense of space without attempting to make it 3-D. I didn't want it to look studied or an attempt to reproduce the trees. I was on a project with access to certain colors and did not want to spend weeks and months on it. No more than 3 days. Rule of thumb. I wanted to get the feel of trees, get what trees do. Justin painted some on the outside yesterday after finishing the black interior. I told him, do whatever you feel like doing. I wanted his hand/eye in it too. I didn't want to suggest anything to him. I wanted him to find what he thinks it needs. He made green Xs across the top and across the bottom. It surprised me, but didn't when I looked out into the woods at all the branches crossing. Xs were everywhere. Today I incorporated the Xs into the whole, the continuum. Some I painted over lightly with the light brown and went over them with some green strokes that kept the pattern. I'd been working on the vertical and horizontal and he brought in the angles I'd been wondering how I wanted to approach. I was glad he did something so different from what I would have done. That was why I asked him to put on the green. He said, "What do you want me to do?" I said, "It's your world." I wanted him to have the freedom to exercise his own aesthetic sense. I would include it in the whole in my final sweep. We set out to make a fun project and it worked. It was fun.  

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WORKS IN PROGRESS

 

 

work in progress

In response to this week's prompt by Ruth Schowalter in the Daily Creative Practice group, I had two things conceived that were not yet in process toward manifestation. I've seen the above image in my mind's eye for a few weeks looking for ways to perform it. Had it mapped out to satisfaction when Ruth's prompt came up. Thought I'd finish it before end of week and use it for the project. Simultaneously, I was wanting to make something to call Prometheus Unbound. It would have to do with fire and electricity. It is in process too. May take more than a week. This red and black one began as a study in black and red, two equally intense colors. I do not buy that black is not a color. In pigment, black is the presence of all colors. In light, black is absence of color and white is all colors, the reverse of pigment. I'm dealing in pigment, so black is a color same as purple is a color. My favorite black is made from mixing thalo green and thalo red. They make a black like doesn't come in a tube. Blue and orange make a nice, warm black. The black in the picture above came out of two tubes, mars black and ivory black mixed. I used both because I didn't want to empty either tube, only take each one down a ways. They're good for different purposes. This performance above I have been tossing around for a title. The only words to come to me is the one word, Red. I was thinking about calling it The Black and the Red. But, upon more or less completion, I regret that I did not make the black rectangle half an inch taller and wider. It would have balanced the red. Now the red is dominant and the black looks like negative space. I tell myself, though it is finished as far as original vision is concerned, doesn't mean it's finished. Might even call it something like Warehouse. All that is floating around in mind space. Thinking maybe I could buy a wooden egg, paint it like a freaked out easter egg, or several and fix them to it from behind with long screws. That's the beginning of getting complex and the purpose here is simple as possible without imitating Barnett Newman. This shape doesn't have any association resonances with me, though it does favor a corner of a warehouse door and portions of two windows in a brick building. It was not original intent, which is why I like it. An accidental association, so why not bring it to the front.

 

 

original notes

 

The pictures above are the notes recording original vision. The small one was made in the coffee shop where I was sitting at the bar working a Jumble puzzle in the paper, tore off a corner of the paper to make a note. At home, I put it on a square of white paper to let it start growing. I'm thinking I could make another one a different size where the black is dominant and call it Black. And maybe do another size with balanced black and red, to go together or separate. I like the idea of repeating this shape in variations and sizes. I sketched the colors onto the wood, a piece of 3/4 inch plywood with braces glued and screwed to the back to inhibit bowing, as plywood does. It was already primed from more than five years ago when I prepared it for no reason, just to have it ready some day. Original plan was to print the colors onto the wood by cutting out pieces of cardboard the shape I wanted, paint one side of the cardboard, lay it down, press it and lift. Voila! It works small, but I hadn't yet tried it bigger. The size is 9"x11.5". It didn't take too good. Left big splotches that were ok, but also not. Woke up in the night wide awake and head swimming with how I wanted to print it in layers, one on top of the other while wet to mix several shades into one. Good ideas don't always translate into a physical form with the golden glow the it had in my head. The red was not anywhere near to satisfaction, nor was the black. I mixed up some more paint with medium (varnish, turpentine and linseed oil, equal parts) and started slathering it on with palette knife to spread it more or less evenly to maybe lay the cardboard stamp on top of it and lift it off to give the texture I wanted another way. No. I liked the palette knife strokes. At first, I wanted slick, smooth surface and lines. Once the palette knife started dancing, I scraped the paint left on the cardboard, used it all, spread it like soft butter on toast, making it a point to avoid self-conscious swipes in the paint, just slather it on like a kid, keeping the lines straight with soft edges. I began to see what I was doing with the paint, spreading it like it was plaster can only work when it's spread unselfconsciously. Any conscious pattern found in it would catch the eye. I want them to keep the eye moving, a pattern that is not a pattern. A still flame.

 

jean (hans) arp

 

First vision was slick and sharp. It softened in process. Using up all the paint and smearing it on with the butter knife, I was thinking I'd screwed the whole thing up. It didn't work. What the hell. Not enough black. I could let it dry and paint over it or anything. Looked at it, said, "Sucks." Went back to bed after daylight. Might be good to paint something over later. Woke around noon, got up groggy, made some coffee, talked on the phone with Carole, dreading seeing what I'd done. I liked it, liked the paint smeared with palette knife. Now I want to make one the reverse of this. At the same time of putting this one together, another one is in the works. It is a chunk of cement found on the ground at a building site. I see it a head in profile and a profusion of curly hair. The chunk is soaking in a bucket of pale yellow latex paint and water, staining the cement, letting it soak the pigment into it. Next, I'll take some oil red and orange and brush it on lightly. I want to make it suggest fire. Prometheus, the god of foresight who gave us reason by way of fire. For giving us fire, he was chained to a rock. Thinking about fixing a short, old 3-link rusted chain I found somewhere long ago, rusted. I'd leave it hanging loose to suggest unbound. I'll make Prometheus an Irishman with pink face and curly red hair. It will be simple. The chunk of painted cement is to lie down flat atop the pedestal, 5.5"x 5.5"x 9". The wood will be sanded, steel-wooled and stained ebony. Another red and black. I may use a copper wire in some yet unknown way to suggest electricity with Prometheus. I don't want to think too much about it. I want to let it put itself together, let it tell me what it needs, let things fall into place.

prometheus and stand

 

prometheus in process

 

I'm seeing the influence of one of my favorite artists, Jean (Hans) Arp. French/German early Dadaist in Zurich. He cut wood forms with a jigsaw, fixed them together and painted them. I've admired them since I first saw they were his. Saw two, maybe three, at the modern art museum in Zurich. Every time I see something by him, I pause within, receive it, admire its utter simplicity, its accident. I committed a sin against art in the Zurich museum. I saw a stunning piece of white marble, a sort-of circle misshapen Arp-style. No one was in sight. I touched it for a hundredth of a second with the tip of my forefinger. I know it's against all the rules. I also know I did not disfigure or endanger it in any way. I did it to make contact with a favorite artist, an inspiring artist, the Dadaist I connected with best. He played with chance. His simplicity has the same stillness as a Brancusi sculpture, smooth, aerodynamic and hydrodynamic. Arp's paintings and sculptures have a lighthearted air about them. Making a cloud of marble and it having a seeming lightness by association seems like art to me. Arp wrote Dadaist verse as well. I have a book of his poems and essays. He writes a lot about clouds. Change and chance were the subjects that ran through his work. I think it is his lightness that inspires me. I like to embrace the principles of dada in a similar way to how I like to embrace the principles of mountain musicians in my work. It's an attitude about art. Don't take it seriously. Do it in the spirit of play. Marketing not an issue. It's all in the doing. This is why I call making an art object a performance. Off stage. The finished object is on stage. The artist's performance is over when the piece is signed. The performance is from conception to completion, the mental, physical and emotional process of creation. I've wanted to do something that involves colors as themselves. Red and black appeal to me for their strong resonance. I'm feeling inspired, wanting to make some art objects that appeal to me and me only. Make them for my own aesthetic reasons with no consideration to what anyone outside my house might think of it. Something that satisfies me, made freely enough it has no economic considerations, only physical, mental and emotional.

jean (hans) arp

 

 

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