Brrrrrr...... and Digging Deep -

Yesterday morning it was 15 degrees Below Zero here - uhhhhhhh - teeeeth chattttttering!!!! This morning, only 5 below - finally some global warming.....

Anyway - Been in a bit of a funk here - Haiti and some deaths of acquaintances etc... So very much sadness and heaviness of heart!

I've been taking this time to dig deep, doing lots of reading. One of the books I'm reading through for the second time in two weeks actually is "The Shape of a Pocket" by John Berger. I found it in the National Gallery bookstore; I've read some of his other works and this one practically jumped off the shelf at me.

It is truly a remarkable book; a collection of essays speaking to painting as an act of resistance. The second essay, "Steps Towards a Small Theory of the Visible" is one of the best pieces on art and painting I've ever come across. I highly recommend it to anyone asking questions of themselves and the world and paint and the visual!

I've been doing a lot of writing as well lately, trying to figure things out.... about painting .... why I must paint, what I want to paint and I've been feeling a certain meaninglessness about the whole thing - not a depression exactly, but a grasping, a remembering..... And I've come to many conclusions, but one of particular significance is that the state of the world and the state of the world as portrayed by the media, the economy etc... is supposed to effect a state of hollow, shallow, confused meaninglessness.

Now - I don't have a TV, so I have to make a very concerted effort to view one generally. While I was in MD, there was a TV in my room and I was appalled at the degradation that's taken place in the 12 or so years since I've had one. I turned on the tube twice, to try to find something interesting to watch (beside the weather channel or Fox News - Ugh!) Both times the scenes opened with a dead body; the first of a little black girl and the second of a pretty red-head who'd been bludgeoned to death in a bathtub. Wow - what I've been missing! Man! Between that and the news............... what can even be said -

Anyway - the point is, and one of the many poignant points of Berger's book is that the prostitution, (my word, not his) of images, cheap, in your face, over the top, and consumerism driven, -billions of them relentlessly barraging people, contributes immensely to the meaninglessness of them and a seemingly cheapening and devaluing of life. I see this in much of the contemporary paintings I've perused of late. Many of them I even love, they're beautiful, but what do they mean??? All these gazillions of images make paintings harder to see.

This has brought me to a necessary and impassioned conclusion for my own work here. For the time being, I'm only going to work from life! For thousands of years this has been the way artists functioned. I feel a bit of a death in a way these days, trying to make a painting from a digital image. Painting for me is about reciprocity, action - reaction, energy, and the precious use of my binocular vision that becomes neutered by both the flatness and limited color of a photograph.

So I am resisting - painting from life, insisting that painting and the richness of family and friends, relationships, walks in the woods, striving, changing, improvings, giving a damn and looking for God's will all do have exquisite and indelible meaning!!!