Haiku From The Road
The blue mountains rise,
Like phantoms from the prairie.
Cairns to the way home.
Read Kerri’s blog post about THE WAY HOME
Filed under: KS Friday, Uncategorized | Tagged: david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, home, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, the way home, the way home kerri sherwood | Leave a comment »
Many years ago, somewhere in the middle of the 1990’s, I painted a portrait of my dad. It is monochromatic and a fairly quick study. In the painting, he is either emerging or returning to the corn. Or both. I can’t remember why I painted him in the corn except that he was born in Iowa and wished his entire adult life to return to the small town where he grew up. Perhaps this is a painting about yearning. Perhaps it is a painting about returning home.
It occurred to me, when I found it while re-stacking paintings after the great studio flood, that I painted this when he was roughly the age I am now. For a fleeting moment I wanted to paint a monochrome self-portrait simply so I might place it across the room. We’d have a staring contest that reached beyond both of our lives.
I chucked the idea for many reasons but mostly because I had no idea what “field” I might emerge from or into? My symbolic return home would be…what? I am not connected to a single place, a tiny town in Iowa or, like Tom Mck, a ranch in California. I have been a wanderer.
I’ve always loved hands. They are, in many ways, more expressive than faces. They are not as guarded and rarely put on airs. My dad was a working man and has working man hands. He was proud of the work he did. It was hard and broke his body but he loved it. It was out of doors under the open sky. He started his career as a teacher and, although he never confessed as much, I think he hated teaching. The classroom was suffocating. He needed to get his hands in the dirt, feel the sun on his face. Even after he retired, as he aged, he sat on the porch in the mornings, he worked his garden or clipped his grass or cleaned his gutters; anything to be outside.
I had a dream many years ago that has stayed with me. My dad and I were free-falling through time. As we fell, he reached out his hand. I stretched out my arm, tried to grasp his hand, but in falling, we were just out of reach. In the dream I stared intently at his hand as I tried to extend my arm, tried to grasp his hand. I knew, if I was successful, if we could catch his hand, it might not stop our fall, but we, neither of us, would fall alone.
read Kerri’s blog post about COLUMBUS HANDS
Filed under: DR Thursday, Family, Gratitude, Love, Uncategorized | Tagged: columbus, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, father, father/son, hands, home, Iowa, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, monticello iowa, painting, yearning | Leave a comment »
Inosculation is a natural phenomenon in which trunks, branches or roots of two trees grow together. ~ Wikipedia
I’m re-writing my Creatures of Prometheus script. Yaki, the conductor of the symphony, asked that I re-imagine it so the story-within-the-music might better speak to the issues of our day. The original performance was in 2008 and the world has changed mightily since the last time we performed it.
Beethoven wrote his ballet, The Creatures of Prometheus, as a creation story. Zeus ordered Prometheus to fashioned a human male and female. Zeus wanted them to be crudely made, their sole purpose, as he imagined them, was to worship the gods. Instead, Prometheus created something more powerful, more beautiful, more god-like. He knew Zeus would never allow something so beautiful to exist so Prometheus stole the spark of life so he might ignite the hearts of his creatures. That’s how the story begins; Prometheus steals fire to bring life to his beautiful creatures. The rest of the story is biblical. The creatures gain knowledge (separation). The gods corrupt the creatures and teach them division and the game of war, essentially booting them out of the garden. The gods like to watch war games like humans like to watch football on the weekends. It is a story of Prometheus’ punishment for daring to create something so beautiful, so capable, as human beings: he must watch them corrupt themselves for all eternity.
It’s a big story in a big ballet.
I take back what I wrote a paragraph ago. The world hasn’t changed so much. Our ancient and epic divisions and challenges have surfaced. They’ve bobbed to the top. The story Yaki asked me to specifically address is the black-white racial divide in these un-united-united-states. I have more thoughts on this story than I care to admit. And the story I will tell – so similar to the original – is a story of unity corrupted. The revision is a gift from Plato, a seed from The Symposium.
It was a common practice in colonial times, when the wealthy were vastly outnumbered by the locals and laborers – and the King’s army was an ocean away, to divide the commoners along some imaginary line. In the American colonies, the imaginary line was a color line. It’s explicit in our colonial logs and legislation. The fear. The solution. The cleaving. Any gain made by blacks is an automatic threat to white power. It’s a game the gods love to watch, like football on the weekends.
I have long thought that our division is impossible to heal when approached through a racial lens. It acts – and has always acted – as a trigger. Just as it was intended to do. The trigger is built into the system: approaching the racial divide as a racial divide will only serve to reinforce the divide. The division is knit firmly into our national DNA.
A systemic flaw must be addressed systemically. The division was designed in our colonial history because the colors united. For a brief moment the united colors were more powerful than the ruling class. The colors were cleaved and then knit back together through inequity. Keep ’em fighting. The dance of supremacy and suppression. United in discrimination. Unnatural inosculation.
Epic stories always end on a promise. There will be an awakening. The lost brothers will find each other. The Creatures of Prometheus, black and white, divided for the security and sport of the gods, will recognize that they are being used, distracted from their original state, and will join hands and together walk off the field. And only then will the natural inosculation, the branches and roots growing stronger together, become possible.
read Kerri’s blog post about INOSCULATED
Filed under: Flawed Wednesday, Identity, Metaphor, Power, Story | Tagged: backstory, Bacon's rebellion, BLM, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, discrimination, division, inosculated, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, suppression, systemic racism, the creatures of prometheus, white supremacy, yaacov bergman | Leave a comment »
The guy on the horse called out, “I love those. They’re called May Apples!” Kerri was taking photographs of the strangely creature-esque plant when the man in the cowboy hat and chaps rode by. “They’ll blanket the forest floor and be gone by Father’s day,” he said as rode down the trail and disappeared.
It is probably an understatement to suggest that life can sometimes be surreal.
Actually, I’m either not aging well or my eyes are finally opening to the utter strangeness of day-to-day life. The whole ride is surreal. Salvador Dali was a realist and society missed the joke.
Where did the cowboy come from? Considering his outfit, he could well have come from another era. The strange army of plants assembling for their march across the forest floor definitely gave the impression that we’d stepped out of linear time. We could be walking through a Venn Diagram of ages and had stepped into the overlap. Cowboys and prehistoric plants. I took a moment and scouted for dinosaurs since, if my Venn-Diagram-suspicion was accurate, we could be back in the food chain, a snack for a Velociraptor. It’s best to check when reality twists.
It tickled me to think that we might have wandered into the golden age of fairies and spirits. These plants may be watching us. They might have Rip Van Winkle intentions for us; we’d snap photos, continue on our walk and return to a parking lot only to discover that 300 years had passed. What would we do then?
We would do exactly as we are doing now. Navigate the strangeness. Take one-pandemic-day at a time. Orient and reorient to a world seemingly caught in an angry spell, conspiracy theories galloping down the info-trail and disappearing into the mad e-forest, lies bellowed as truths and truths shouted down as lies. The globe warms, the deniers deny (loudly), the religious faithful embrace the outrageous salvation of the pumpkin-orange-grifter. We would sip wine at day’s end and compare strange stories of magic, confusion and wonderment sometimes known as “news”.
Salvador Dali was a realist. I’m now certain of it. The Grimm Brothers were historians and not purveyors of folklore. We walk in the woods, Hansel and Gretel could be just around the bend. If we come across Rumpelstiltskin, we’ll be sure to share the gold spun from straw. Or not. By the time we get to the car, gold may have been a passing fancy, worthless, and tin foil will be the market standard. Who knows! This place is a miracle of possibilities and unpredictability. Avalon disappears into the mist. Time bends or at least drapes lazily in our vast dream-scape.
We walk in the woods. The May Apples assemble for a march. Their ultimate intention is anyone’s guess.
read Kerri’s blog post about MAY APPLES
Filed under: Random, Two Artists Tuesday | Tagged: avalon, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, dream scape, fairies, fairy tales, folklore, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, magic, May Apple, salvador dali, spirits, surrealism, The Brothers Grimm | Leave a comment »
I am fond of falling into rabbit holes. For instance, I just wrote the phrase, “racking my brain” and then doubted my spelling and wrote, “wracking my brain.” Was I wracking my brain or racking my brain as I tried to figure out who Lily Tomlin reminded me of? We’ve been binge watching episodes of Grace & Frankie.
This is what the oracle in the temple of google revealed to me: To rack one’s brain is to torture it or to stretch it by thinking very hard. To wrack one’s brain would be to wreck it. This might sort of make sense in some figurative uses, but rack is the standard spelling where the phrase means to think very hard.
After sufficiently stretching my brain on the rack, somewhere in the early episodes of season 2, I realized that Lily Tomlin’s character reminded me of my great aunt Dorothy. Not so much in specific action – but in orientation to life and in appearance. I admired her greatly.
Dorothy lived on the side of a mountain in a small house that may or may not have ever been level. It was a down hill stroll when walking from the kitchen to the living area. She cooked on a cast iron wood burning stove. Her tiny yard, also clinging to the side of the mountain, was a miracle of blue bottles glittering in the sun and brilliant red hummingbird feeders. Poncho, a dog older than god herself, sat in the yard and watched the day go by. My great uncle Del rolled cigarettes and kept his world war 2 army jeep in usable shape.
Dorothy and Del were more interested in living life simply rather than gathering possessions or stacking achievements. The promise of a week with them was a promise of adventure. Catching pollywogs in old coffee cans, building rafts so we could Huck Finn our way across high mountain lakes, bumping in the jeep over ancient gold mining trails, discovering cabins and shelters slowly being reclaimed by the land. There were old graveyards and the hillside that the mountain town considered its dump. Dorothy was famous (to me) for finding treasure there. She had the eyes to see possibilities and potential in the community’s discards.
I often wonder if my love of walking was a gift from Dorothy. I adored walking with her. She was, at the same time, a free spirit and completely grounded. She was dedicated to the appreciation of the moment. No frills. No illusions. The sun on her face was cause for celebration. She never traded simple present joy for some imagined future gain.
When I think of her, I smile. When I think of the many people who have influenced me, Quinn and Tom, Doug, MM, Mark, Judy…they all have a bit of Dorothy in their characters. Outliers. See-ers. Lots of laughter and ideas. The ability to find treasure – or make treasure – in the people and the possessions that society routinely throws away. Appreciators of the moment. Sharers of the riches they find there. Walkers-through-life that pay attention. Each and every one evokes a smile when they wander through my thoughts.
Ask me what makes a good life, what it is I hope to emulate, and leave behind, I will not need to rack or wrack my brain. I will point you to the long river of inspiration and smiles whose headwaters come from a tiny scrappy woman who lived in a tippy house on the side of a mountain surrounded by hummingbirds, colored glass, bacon and wood smoke.
read Kerri’s blog post about SMILE
Filed under: Gratitude, Heroes, Merely A Thought Monday, Possibility, Seeing | Tagged: Central City, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, Dorothy, Grace and Frankie, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, Lily Tomlin, meaning of life, mountain, presence, simple life, walking | 2 Comments »
My mom tells me that my dad is becoming a little bird. His body shrinks as dementia takes his mind. He is continually packing for a trip, his clothes wrapped in tight balls or stuffed in odd places. He waits at the door.
Listen to Kerri’s Fistful Of Dandelions. It tells the story of a life cycle. A mother and her small child. The child grows. The roles reverse. The son becomes the giver of care. It is nature’s cycle and, with each passing phase of the cycle, comes the appreciation of the true riches in this transient life: moments together. Holding hands. Picking dandelions. Titanic love. “…all the riches I will need today…” Simple presence chocked full of simple appreciation.
I interviewed for a job last week. The questions they asked were questions designed for a younger person, someone at the beginning of their career. I laughed and replied that their question had nothing to do with me. I no longer climb the achievement ladder. I am at the other end, the son holding tender space for the shrinking bird.
The illusions drop away as the sand runs out. The wall of respect might hold plaques and certificates but they grow more empty over time. Paper in a frame. The car in the garage never really provided the status it promised.
What remains is the real stuff. Holding hands. A fistful of dandelions. Shared time. Beer-thirty on the back porch. A pocket full of memories. Warm days fishing together at the lake. Listening to records deep into the night. Packing boxes and helping with the move. Making sure this tiny bird is safe as he waits with his bundle at the door. Just as he did for me.
read Kerri’s blog post about FISTFUL OF DANDELIONS
fistful of dandelions ©️ 1999 kerri sherwood
Filed under: Family, KS Friday, Love | Tagged: david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, fistful of dandelions, illusions, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, life cycles, love, parents and children, presence, small moments, transience | Leave a comment »
“We cannot struggle to be present. We can only discover that we are present.” ~ Declan Donnellan
The struggle to reach across the divide and grasp hands with the one that you love. It is a universal story. Yearning requires an obstacle to ignite the story.
I painted this for Kerri when we were attempting to bridge the divide. I lived in Washington. She lived in Wisconsin. During a visit, sitting in Adirondack chairs in her front yard, sipping wine and listening to music, we discovered that we were present. We danced in timelessness.
Obstacles become surmountable when love is on the other side of the abyss. We moved mountains and then dealt with the consequences.
It’s a rule that an artist should never tell an audience what a painting means, should never rob a viewer of their response, interpretation, and story of a painting. Sometimes it’s alright to break a rule. I painted this painting for Kerri. It’s about reaching for love across the divide, discovering the present, and the promise of dancing our way through the obstacles.
read Kerri’s blog post about DANCING IN THE FRONT YARD
dancing in the front yard ©️ 2013 david robinson
Filed under: DR Thursday, Gratitude, Love, Story | Tagged: dancing, dancing in the front yard, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, love, obstacle, presence, present moment, yearning | Leave a comment »
I laughed heartily when I saw this Dodge Challenger commercial. It’s entitled Family Motto and inadvertently speaks to the one of the major challenges of our times. We have a very hard time separating the real from the fabricated. The frame freezes, the small boy in the driver’s seat of the in-studio-muscle-car looks to the camera and says, “Our lawyers just want you to know that this isn’t real.” They poke fun at the ease of deception, the effortlessness of suspended disbelief. It’s fun to believe that the kid is driving the car.
It’s fun until it’s not.
For instance, in a lawsuit against Tucker Carlson, the lawyers at Fox News successfully argued that no reasonable viewer would take anything he said seriously. In other words, much of what he espouses is nonsense not to be believed. It’s entertainment, not information. He’s akin to a comedian, like Stephen Colbert – only not funny. Sydney Powell, after months of sowing doubt and slandering Dominion Voting Machines over the last election is attempting to make the same argument. Reasonable people, she claims, would never believe a word that she said. All of those press conferences, those indignant claims of voter fraud blasted into the news cycle, were apparently for sport. They were meant to be fun.
Thinking-people should know better than to believe what they are being told. Reasonable people know that the kid isn’t really driving the car and so they should also know that the pundit and the lawyer are peddling fiction and not fact.
It’s one thing to sell a car. It’s quite another to sell a false-reality. To peddle a lie. The car is being sold during a commercial. The false-reality is being sold on a network platform that sports the word “news.” Context is everything. Reasonable people, we are told, should know the difference. Is it news? Is it a commercial? Is it entertainment or press event? What do we call it if it is broadcast between commercials?
The problem, of course, is that reasonable people are either in short supply or they base their reason, invest their faith and belief in places they ought not. The false-narrative is literally ranted into the camera from behind a news desk or at a press conference. It’s propounded with the same enthusiasm that Phil Swift uses when selling Flex Seal products – only not as nice. The lie is proclaimed as truth. And then, the lawyers step in. And then, the story changes. The previously spouted truth should not be believed and reasonable people ought to know better.
We have a very hard time separating the real from the fabricated, news from entertainment. We’ve had a lot of help ascending our mountain of confusion.
I recently heard this phrase: an armed person is a citizen, an unarmed person is a subject. It is, of course, a phrase that is bandied about by the 2nd Amendment alarmists but I think it is more relevant and applicable when “being armed” applies, not to guns, but to information. Those men and women who stormed the Capitol, beating the police with flags, declaring their freedom, were in fact, being sold a false narrative. Voluntary subjects void of information, grown fat on a diet of fantasy. Easily led.
A person armed with information in the face of so much deliberate confusion, has a prayer of being a citizen. Achieving reason takes some effort. The lawyers want to you know that no reasonable person should believe that the kid is driving the car. The same is true for the space between the commercials, the detritus in the media stream.
read Kerri’s blog post about IT’S NOT REAL
Filed under: Flawed Wednesday, Perspective | Tagged: citizen, citizenship, confusion, control fantasy, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, dodge challenger, entertainment, fabrication, fact, false reality, fiction, Fox News, information, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, reality, stephen colbert, sydney powell, truth, tucker carlson | Leave a comment »
“The artist finds, rather than creates and controls.” ~ Declan Donnellan
I’m not sure when I began including floral shapes in my paintings. I’ve always appreciated the shape of symbols and shapes as symbols. One day in my Seattle studio, I lined the walls with my most recent paintings and was surprised to discover leaves and plants and stems etched into figures and the spaces. My charcoal and paint flora was generic; they were not studies of plants nor in any way representational. They were shapes. They were accidental.
Even when my plant-shapes became intentional they remained generic, improvisational. I didn’t go outside and study the shapes of leaves. It never occurred to me to step into the field next to my studio and look at the plant life. I’m slow that way.
And then I met Kerri. We walk almost every day. While my mind wanders into the ethers and gets lost in the sky, she is busy looking at life’s minutiae. She stops often and takes photographs, usually of a tiny treasure. A forest flower. The bud about to burst on a limb. A butterfly nestled into the leaves. “Look!” she exclaims and kneels on the path, camera in hand. She navigates thorns, wades into tall grasses, climbs over rocks, all to get close enough to see, really see the miniature miracle.
Because she sees, I see. She is single-handedly responsible for my ongoing Georgia O’Keeffe revival. And what I’ve re-learned as Kerri beckons me to, “Come Look!” is that my vast imagination is not capable of creating the amazing shapes and colors and delights that surround me. I’ve been walking through this intense world of marvels my whole life and noticed only the smallest slice. The best I can do is pay attention and dance with what I find.
It’s humbling – as it should be. I’ll never be a better creator than nature because I am a creation of nature. In fact, I realize again and again that my job as an artist is not to create, it is to discover what is already right in front of my face. To open eyes – my eyes and others’ eyes – to the enormity of what already exists. The wild shapes, the dancing colors, the glow of life that I’ll never be able to capture, no matter how great my technique or pure my intention. The best I can do is point to the mystery, with symbol, shape and color, and say, as Kerri does for me each and every day, “Look! Come Look!”
read Kerri’s blog post about SUCCULENTS
Filed under: Art, Awakening, Creativity, Seeing, Two Artists Tuesday | Tagged: artist, artistry, color, composition, creation, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, declan donnellan, discovery, Georgia O'Keeffe, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, nature, noticing, seeing, shape, symbol, the art of seeing | Leave a comment »
There are charts for everything. Definitions and distinctions of value meant to clarify but, in the end, make life seem more and more farcical. For instance, we recently were directed to a worker’s compensation website and learned that losing your hand in an accident is worth 400 weeks of [minimal] compensation. The dominant hand is worth more than the non-dominant hand. Fingers have less value-in-weeks than a thumb. Just imagine the guys-and-gals-in-suits sitting around a conference table discussing the value of a human hand as expressed in weeks. Sometimes I’m certain that we live inside the mind of Gary Larson.
Is it no wonder that we are confused about the value of a human life? We have actuaries calculating human-life-value and making smart looking tables with support graphs to answer this most fundamental question. I’m certain that those guys-and-gals-in-suits sitting around the conference table would come up with a different answer if it was their hand or fingers or toes or life on the chopping block. If it was their child’s eye or foot. Charts, like all data points, are not personal.
We awoke this morning to the news that the latest mass shooting (if 4 or more people are shot it is, according to the FBI, considered “mass”) was in our town. We are number 47 since March 16. March 16 is the date of the mass shooting in Atlanta; 8 people were killed. Here are some nifty and comprehensive charts on gun violence in America.
When I was in elementary school we did safety drills, crawling under our desks, in the event of an atomic bomb drop. Although I was certain that my desk was not going to protect me in the event of an atomic explosion, I was comforted by the knowledge that the enemy was far away, external. Now, our children in elementary school do active shooter drills and they, too, know that their desks offer little protection. But their predicament is dire: the enemy they face is right here. It is everywhere, internal. Sitting under my desk I knew there was an entire military machine between me and the potential dropper of atom bombs. Sitting under their desks, our children know with certainty that there is nothing, not even legislative will, standing between them and the ubiquitous shooter.
I once listened to an author speak about the difficulty of writing a farce about the USA. He said, “Before you can a publish the book, the fictional farce that you’d written will have actually happened.” Our scary farce: the only answer we can muster to daily mass killing in schools, grocery stores, work places, concerts, houses of worship…the only idea that the markets will support in an out-of-control gun culture, is more guns. Sales charts and political donation data drive policy to dedicated inaction. [For some lightheartedness in the midst of this dark-and-dismal post, go here. I laughed aloud when I heard comic Steve Hofstetter riff on gun control.]
What is the value of a human life?
We had a lovely conversation in the grocery store. An accidental path crossing with friends. Sue remarked, as we compared life experiences, that our personal challenges are meant to remind us that we are still here.
What is the value of a human life as determined by those of us who are still here?
Bertold Brecht wrote a play called The Caucasian Chalk Circle. Two women claim to be the mother of a small child. A judge has to settle the case. He has a small circle drawn on the ground. The child is placed in the circle. The judge instructs the women to stand on opposite sides of the circle, each taking one of the child’s hands. The woman that successfully pulls the child from the circle will be declared the mother. One woman quickly yanks the child from the circle. The other will not pull. She refuses. She cannot do harm to her child. She proves herself to be the true mother.
I wonder what we might value if we could put down our charts and data points and amendments-as-seen-in-isolation-from-all-the-other-amendments, step beyond our abstractions, and draw a simple circle in the dirt. What might we discuss if we placed a small child in the circle, and considered the value of that one precious life? My bet is that none of us would yank that child out of the circle of life. We’d do everything imaginable to protect the child from harm. To keep it safe. Sales graphs and actuary tables and every other dehumanizing analytic would drop away. We would, in considering the beating heart of our public dangers, make the safety of the child, of every child, our personal challenge. It would slap us awake and remind us that we are still here. Alive. And, as custodians of the circle of each and every actual life, we are responsible to and for each other.
read Kerri’s blog post about STILL HERE
Filed under: Edges, Merely A Thought Monday, Pattern, Perspective | Tagged: 2nd Amendment, abstraction, actuary, Amendments, Brecht, Caucasian Chalk Circle, charts and graphs, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, farce, Gary Larson, gun control, gun violence, human life value, Kenosha, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, mass shooting, The Far Side, value, worker's comp | Leave a comment »
The Direction of Intention 