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Being Present

For the last couple of years I’ve been exercising the ability to let go and let whatever comes to work through me.

A lifelong friend and abstract painter has been trying to get me to stop with the realism and figurative art for as long as I’ve known her. Dive into the abstract.

Just try it. So, I have. I filled up several sketchbooks with drawings of nothing. Just pencil at first. I made a series of Coloring Pages and a Coloring Book. I had a couple of installations of large Coloring Pages and provided crayons for the gallery patrons to try their hands at it and really get into doing art right then and there. Then I started adding color myself. I made images smaller.

Like this one above, a couple of tiny designs encased in plastic sleeves so they can be carried easily. Why? As ‘Emergency Art’. What, you may ask, is emergency Art? It is art you can have handy when life seems bleak, frustrations rise, tempers grow short. Sure, you could carry a copy of some Monet or Picasso in your wallet, but that is just a copy, a print, a clipping, not the real thing. But, you may now complain, Monet and Picasso did not make tiny bits of art to carry around. Their doodles and sketches, if they exist, are likely in museums or private collections and are probably larger than a few inches square. Ah HA! This is where I come in. I’ve been filling up old, discarded photo albums with snapshot sized real original one of a kind art. This “exercise” has caused much food for thought, like: Does size really matter? The black and white painting at the of this writing is nearly eight feet wide. Painting large was fun. I was younger then, stronger, and muscling large stretcher bars and frames in and out of vans was not the overwhelming challenge for me then as it is now. Besides, if a large piece of speculative and personally fulfilling artwork does not sell, there is the reality of storing it somewhere. My walls are covered with both mine and the collected art of others. I no longer have the space for additions. The solution then was to not only go small but to reimagine a design that could be enlarged if I wanted to or if a patron declared “Yes! I really like THAT one!” Okay, I’d say in my mind, what size, and then paint it?


I thought about the art humans have carried with them for millennia. Tiny goddesses. Amulets. Jewelry. I made those things, too. I even developed a new appreciation for the art of tattoo, though not enough to indelibly mark my own skin. Art was at first I think protection, a calling in of cosmic forces, companion magic of a sort. Hmmmm


Well, my abstract painting friend loves the drawings I’d been producing and that has made us both happy. She is able to use my little drawings to teach from rather than Kandinsky prints – probably because I am a bit easier to understand, emulate and procure.

“Just let your hand go, make the lines go all the way top to bottom and side to side… now color in the spaces.” Try it. Don’t criticize, just do, and don’t throw it away.


Besides the issue of size, another concept that arose was ‘Beauty’ – what is it really?

Why were Medieval artists so crude in rendering humans and animals in comparison to waaay older examples of artistic accomplishment such as the ancient Greeks, Romans and Egyptians? Heck, Neanderthal cave paintings…. Okay, bad example, those were animals other than human. Were Dark Ages Artists simply unaware of how realism worked? Were they merely unskilled? Their calligraphy and floral ornamentations of illuminated manuscripts were certainly sophisticated, why were the people depicted so flat and funny looking? Maybe they were considered beautiful at the time! Okay, they forgot geometry and hadn't yet invented perspective. When Rome fell it took about 800 years to remember how to make bronze, so….


Beauty is so often equated with ‘good.’ Good morally, and good as in 'well done'. Experience will tell you that it ain’t necessarily so. Leave it to me to then draw some deliberately unbeautiful images of the Virgin Mary and her sacred son Jesus, not as a slur, but as a contemplation. The images were not the expected symmetrical well-proportioned ideals of Western Art but they were still ‘sacred’ portraits. Once the annoyance wore off, their uncommon facial features were not so bad. Kind-of like just regular people who are not fashion models. What makes ‘good’ or ‘goodness’ good? Why isn't common place also beautiful? Well, it is.


One aspect of Art I truly explore is its ability to arouse emotion in the viewer. To ask the question: What is real? What is beauty? What is sacred? What is that? Why do we allow war?

I may not be able to engage emotionally with a vase of sunflowers, but if the car keys and phone are on the table, if the cat is walking by, I wonder about who left the keys, who might call, and is the vase safe with that cat? Sure, I could also get engaged by the technique, texture, colors, shapes and all that. I gasp and marvel at some artist’s techniques and colors – the atmosphere created, the startling use of line. I’m happy to admire that. I’m happy that the artist sees THAT in the world and thought enough of others to share it with them. And then I return to my meditation of letting go. Letting go of the voices that compare and judge and criticize and condemn. If I can let this go in myself, the theory is, I can let it go in my thoughts of others. If I can embrace that in myself, I should be able to embrace that in my fellow human beings ... who are SO needing Art.


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