Together Thrive [on Merely A Thought Monday]

Posted on May 1, 2023 by davidrobinsoncreative

“Art is an illusion that can convey the truth.” ~ Alex Grey

The little boy who was obsessed with drawing eyes – for hours on end – was not attempting to perfect the drawing; he was trying to reach beyond the visual and touch what was inside. Beyond. To the place of joining.

That motive has never wavered. I have always been at-service. For Kerri and me, art-as-service is the impulse behind our blogs. It’s at the center of our many cartoons. It’s the driving impulse in the plays I have yet to write and the few books that haunt me at night. It’s in the music Kerri amasses in her mind and hums when she’s walking down the trail.

We understand art is essential. That’s not an abstraction. Look into the abyss of your death and tell me where you go to wrap your mind around it? Politics? Business publications? Software? My bet is you read the poets. You listen to Arvo Pärt. You stare at The Sistine Chapel. You walk a labyrinth. You read the words of Anne Frank or ponder a psalm. How do you reach beyond what you can see and touch the essence of what is inside? Infinite? How do you make sense of the big questions? If we do good in the world, what does it inspire you to see? If you do good in the world, what does it help us to see?

It’s hard to put a price on it. It’s impossible to put words around it. And it is our reason for being.

Without you, we cannot thrive.

read Kerri’s blogpost about THRIVE

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Filed under: Art, Creativity, Identity, Merely A Thought Monday | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Turn Around And Look [on DR Thursday]

Posted on April 20, 2023 by davidrobinsoncreative

One little line gives reference to the whole. The horizon line. It is how we naturally – visually – orient in space. It is a baseline of perception. It’s the beginning of discernment.

It is a line that disappeared.

Among other things, art is a reflection of its time. In the past century, art leapt into the abstract. We are “post-modern”. Expressions of personal fantasy rule over community truth, a breaking apart of shared ideals, instant doubt of objective theories…we are mirrored in post-modern art. What is art? What is it not? There’s not a whit of agreement to be found.

General distrust is the beating heart of the post-modern ideal. Division, aggression, tribalism, conspiracy…are its blossoms. Our children perform active-shooter-drills in school; a performance we shudder to attend while our leaders smile and look the other way. Post-modernism at its finest. The absence of a baseline.

Shared truth, group trust, community…requires an undeniable horizon line.

What is up? What is down? What has value? What does not? What has merit? What is undeserving? There is a line. Where is it?

Walking through the antique mall, Brad and I discussed chatGPT. I’m playing with it; he’s using it in his work. It’s raising some very big questions. The questions are not new. They are the next step in a series of questions people have been asking for the past 30 years: what is true? A photograph was once proof that something happened. That hasn’t been true for a few decades. A video was once proof an experience occurred. That is no longer true. News – a word that once implied the accurate reporting of an event. No more. No horizon line.

Brad and I turned our discussion to a sorely missing quality in our times: discernment. In the absence of a horizon line, people will – and do – believe anything. We speculated that, with the introduction of chatGPT into our world, perhaps discernment will once again become important. Perhaps the complete absence of a truth-anchor will turn us toward a common center and require us to look at each other, to seek and restore general trust. The post-modern tide will someday turn and we will draw an old/new line in the sand: we’re-all-in-this-together.

I know, I know. Pie-in-the-sky. However, I’d like to point out that shared dreaming brought us here. Shared dreaming is how we stood on the moon. It is how we can talk to someone across the planet using a small device that fits in our pockets. When a dream becomes shared it becomes powerful. Manifest. A shared dream is a form of a horizon line.

If a shared dream isn’t powerful enough to establish trust, try remembering the other one; the original line of discernment. The line that invites curiosity. It need not be debated. Turn around and look. The horizon line is everywhere.

Four-by-Four, 48x48IN, acrylic, (sold)

read Kerri’s blogpost about THE HORIZON

4×4 © 2007 david robinson

Filed under: Art, Creativity, DR Thursday, Edges, Identity | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Reach Back To Move Forward [on Two Artists Tuesday]

Posted on March 7, 2023 by davidrobinsoncreative

I wrote with great derision of the day I went to the Museum of Modern Art in NYC and watched people line up to take selfies with Van Gogh’s Starry Night. So, more than 15 years later, I howled with laughter at myself when Kerri beckoned me to stand with her so we might take a shadow shot with Diebenkorn’s painting, Ocean Park #68. “We’ll call it ‘Richard and Us!” she smiled.

Kerri recently challenged me to let go of my figurative work, release the image and paint my feelings. The moment before she beckoned me to take the shadow shot, I was having a minor revelation. There’s a reason I have stood in front of this painting for hours. There’s a reason it “talks with me” about simplicity and courage. Early in his life Richard Diebenkorn was a figurative painter. Even earlier, his work was abstract and resembled the paintings of the masters he admired. As his work matured it circled back to abstraction. He didn’t “let go” of his figurative work; he grew through it. He reached through it. In Ocean Park, he fulfilled his unique voice.

I read that his Ocean Park series was greatly influenced by the work of Henri Matisse. I imagined Richard Diebenkorn standing in front of his favorite Matisse, having a quiet conversation about simplicity and the courage to explore. In the gallery light, his shadow cast upon the painting as he moved forward to study the brushstrokes. He leaned in. He reached back to Henri to move forward. Had he lived in the age of cell phones and easy shots, I’m certain he’d have taken a shadow-selfie so he might remember the moment his shadow touched Henri’s.

We were alone in the gallery when Kerri took our shadow-selfie with Richard. We had him all to ourselves. We leaned in. I thought it especially poignant, our shadows cast upon a painting, an artist, who has cast his long shadow upon me. We caught the moment our shadow touched Richard’s. Reaching back to move forward,

read Kerri’s blogpost about RICHARD AND US

Filed under: Art, Creativity, Heroes, Two Artists Tuesday | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Shape The Story [on KS Friday]

Posted on February 17, 2023 by davidrobinsoncreative

“It’s amazing how a little tomorrow can make up for a whole lot of yesterday.” ~ John Guare

Jen’s question sparked a many-days-conversation between Kerri and me. She asked about my favorite childhood birthday memory. I stared into space. My memory pool was empty. There was nothing but white noise between my ears. I sputtered something about awkward valentines in elementary school. Later, on the drive home, I confessed to Kerri how unnerved I was to have little or no distinct memory to recount. Both Jen and Brad had palpable stories to tell – and many of them.

Since that evening we’ve talked about the power of reminiscing. Neither of us has lived near our families. We’ve had relatively few opportunities to sit around a table and tell stories of childhood, recount foibles, ask questions, laugh at where we’ve been and what we’ve done with the people who shared the experiences with us. During our recent trip to Florida I was startled at Bill’s precise memories of his time in Vietnam. Each year he gathers with the surviving members of his squad and they tell stories of their service. His memories are clear because he regularly tells and hears the stories. It’s a ritual meant to keep vital the thread of connection to the past. Shared story is the glue that holds together a family, found-family or otherwise.

Last night we were wide awake at 3am. We turned on the light and returned to our conversation about the power of reminiscence. The power of enlivening stories with others who hold the same memory. Kerri can tell me stories about raising her children but I wasn’t there. We were not parents together so I am able ask questions but I am unable to spark a visceral memory with, “Do you remember when we…” A one way street is not as accessible as a memory street shared by two.

Inevitably, as the sun began to rise on our sleepless night, our conversation turned toward what we want to create. Together. What are the shapes of our dreams? We began to tell stories in the other direction. We imagined and, so, we created. The power of reminiscence balanced by the power of aspiration. We laughed and built metaphoric houses. We populated studios with creations. Kerri challenged me to paint in a new way, not images but to give color and shape to my feelings.

Feelings. Suddenly, I remember a birthday from a time I was very young, single digits. In the basement, made from refrigerator boxes, Columbus built a birthday surprise. A train or an airplane? I can’t remember. But I felt like it was yesterday, the thrill of running down the stairs to see what my father had made for me.

Kerri’s albums are available on iTunes and streaming on Pandora

read Kerri’s blogpost about THE TRACKS

meander/as it is © 2004 kerri sherwood

Filed under: Art, Creativity, Identity, KS Friday, Story | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Wink With Piet [on Not So Flawed Wednesday]

Posted on November 30, 2022 by davidrobinsoncreative

My first thought was of Piet Mondrian. Not the colorful compositions but a never-before-seen shadow side. Abstract reduction into simple geometry. An artistic vocabulary concerned with spirituality and universal values. I used to ponder how a utopian pursuit of the spiritual landed on clean hard geometry; bold primary colors set inside hard black lines. I’m certain that, given a similar pursuit, my visual vocabulary would have been softer. Ethereal.

It was the first snow. I looked down at the aging planks of the bench. A criss-cross-apple-sauce of workmanship dusted with white. We’ve never painted the loveseat. After so many years, so many winters and summers, rain and snow and sun, the grain of the wood is alive with texture. An aged face.

One of my favorite rituals of spring is the first sitting. After another freezing winter, another year of age, will the wood continue to hold my weight, our weight? We hold hands and sit slowly, gingerly. Our knees creak before our weight finds the planks. Like a baton pass, the wood takes on the groaning as our knees pass our load to the seat. We sit for a moment with eyes open wide. And then, after a slight bounce-test, we relax. The wood will hold. Our loveseat is like a faithful friend.

The snow melted as fast as it arrived. That is the way of first snow. Blink and you’ll miss it. Except for the love seat and matching chair, we hauled all the other summer furniture into the garage. The table and umbrella. The small ladders that serve as end tables. The fire pit. The first dusting of snow is the cue. The pond freezes so we pull the pump and fountain. Soon, we’ll stack the plastic Adirondack chairs and they’ll take the last available spot in our tiny garage. We push the loveseat to the wall beneath the kitchen window.

We stand on the deck and sigh, feeling the weight of coming winter. The dark days. For a moment, the yard seems bleak. But then, the birds land on the wire. The squirrel highway is open for business. We hear the ancient croak of the cranes in the distance. A cold gust brings a blizzard of falling leaves. A wholly different kind of abundance. The energy moves underground. A time for sleeping and quiet rejuvenation.

Simple geometry. Reduction to cold days and hard lines. Brilliant blue sky. A wink from Piet Mondrian.

read Kerri’s blogpost about THE DECK

Filed under: Art, Flawed Wednesday, Language, Seeing | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Choose The Lesser Chaos [on DR Thursday]

Posted on November 10, 2022 by davidrobinsoncreative

“If I choose abstraction over reality, it is because I consider it the lesser chaos.” ~ Robert Brault

And what isn’t an abstraction? Dealing with ideas rather than events? Not-the-thing-but-is referential-to-the thing?

Every word in every language is an abstraction. Every thought that zips through every brain is an abstraction. Not the thing but referential to it. The word “chair” is not a chair.

I caught myself in a sticky net. Not once, several times. I’ve tried again and again to paint “abstractions” only to whine, ‘I can’t abstract!” [insert laugh track]. A painting of something is, by definition, not the something. Picasso had a heyday playing with people’s minds around this idea, this abstraction.

After an unexplainable medical event, my doctor shrugged and said, “Sometimes there is no explanation. People like to rationalize things. They think if they can explain it, they can control it.”

Explain Pollock or Rothko. Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park series. Ellsworth Kelly.

And who wouldn’t rather spend time pondering the sense of Richard Serra than anything we read in the news?

read Kerri’s blog post about ABSTRACTION

earth interrupted, 48x53IN, mixed media

earth interrupted © 2012 david robinson

Filed under: Art, DR Thursday, Perspective | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Discover It [on Not So Flawed Wednesday]

Posted on September 28, 2022 by davidrobinsoncreative

The mist from the falls danced with the sunlight. Waterfall aura. Waterfall halo. We stood in the bands of color and laughed. Full body color tickle.

And then, a hush of utter appreciation. We listened to the chamber music of rushing water over the edge of rock. It was so beautiful there was nothing to be done but to close our eyes. Drink it in. Mist on our faces.

And then, we continued upward. The trail was steep so our steps were slow.

Krishnamurti wrote that, “To find out what is truth there must be great love and a deep awareness of (hu)man’s relationship to all things – which means that one is not concerned for one’s progress and achievements.”

In his book, Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse wrote that for every truth there exists an opposite truth. We humans are largely resistant to grasping both sides of wholeness. We like to be right so we tend to “fix” our half-truth in white-knuckled abstractions. Lost in our minds and paging through our rulebook-for-living, we miss the fullness of our relationship to all that surrounds us.

Standing by the waterfall, slowly climbing the mountain, it was easy to love our relationship to all things. The trail brought quiet to our minds. Each step, moment to moment, a full vibrant discovery of truth.

read Kerri’s blogpost about WATERFALL HALO

Filed under: Flawed Wednesday, Gratitude, Love | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Meet On The Deck [on KS Friday]

Posted on July 8, 2022 by davidrobinsoncreative

Lately, when I close up shop for the day and come down the stairs from my office, Kerri and I meet on the back deck. We choose sun or shade, settle in, and talk about our day. There are stories to share, ideas to consider, speculations. Sometimes she’ll catch me up on the news, what’s happened in the world since I climbed the stairs in the morning.

Lately, listening to the news-of-the-day is like strapping a large stone to my chest and jumping into deep water. An intentional sink. “Why would I do that to myself?” I ask myself. I call Kerri’s morning surf through social media her “horror trawl.”

The back deck is a place of hope. I can hear the news-of-the-day on the back deck because, while listening, I watch the hummingbirds zip and hover. The evenings are alive with the most extraordinary bird song. The gurgle of the pond is a soothing meditation. The vibrant life on the back deck is immediate and vital. I know the neighborhood fox is actively hunting the neighborhood bunnies so it’s not all rainbows and sunshine, but it is natural process. It is not excessive or hyped or angry. It’s life without self-indulgence or puffery.

I can hear the news of the day on the back deck because I can detach from it. In comparison to the hummingbirds or the squirrels running atop the fence, it seems like a bad soap opera, a cast of characters dedicated to their guck.

After the intentional sink, for an extra dose of hope, I visit the tomato plants. They seem to be doubling in size every day. The blossoms have appeared. Kerri takes my hand and leads me to the pots. “Lookit!” she smiles “More tomatoes in waiting!”

Tomatoes in waiting. Harbingers of good things to come. The stuff of life – to taste and touch. Little red bursts of captured sunshine. The real stuff. Life expressing life.

Kerri’s albums are available on iTunes & streaming on Pandora

read Kerri’s blogpost on TOMATOES IN WAITING

this part of the journey/this part of the journey © 1998 kerri sherwood

Filed under: KS Friday, Perspective, Story | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Look Up. Look Higher. [on Merely A Thought Monday]

Posted on June 20, 2022 by davidrobinsoncreative

“And men are so poor in intellect that a few cold chills down their spine will be enough to keep them from ever finding out the truth about anything.” ~ Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain

This will read like a blazing generality and I do not intend it to be so. Some of the best people I have known are readers of the book(s). They learned along the line to read their book(s) as metaphor instead of literally, as a history. There are, after all, many paths up the same mountain.

As for me, I was cured of religion when I was a boy but it’s taken a lifetime to understand what and why – and to find language to express what should (to me) be obvious to all.

It only takes a moment to lift your eyes from the book and look up – all the way up to the sky. The book is a human invention, as are the gods and the stories of the gods told in them. The sky, on the other hand, complete with stars and suns and universes beyond imagining, are not human inventions. The book lives in the human mind. That which the book is meant to illuminate is…wholeness…all around us. We are part of, not separate from. That’s it. It’s that simple. The game of separation and unity.

We are part of, not separate from. This word “Love” is unity, the absence of made-up-separations.

The book will have you believing that your body and its myriad of impulses are, like nature, in need of taming. Separation from yourself. The book will promote the notion of a chosen few, the singular path, a destiny that is manifest. Separation from other. Elevation for team-white. Moral authority for team-straight. It’s probably good to feel above others and certainly feels powerful to believe yourself keeper of the book’s rules. Isn’t it blatantly obvious that the rules were/are made by men to justify, as-the-voice-of-god, all manner of privilege and cruelty? Separation, separation, separation.

Here’s what I understood as a boy: any god that promotes separation in any form is very small, indeed, and probably not worth worshipping. At the very least it is a man-made god meant to make folks feel better about their obvious impermanence in an infinite universe.

There’s so much in this life worthy of our worship.

Whether or not we walk as one or decide to beat the hell out of each other for the color of our skin or the natural orientation of our sexuality has nothing to do with the vast universe outside of the book. We create the separations to justify our fear or to protect our property.

We are completely capable of love. We are completely capable of reaching across the unknown and living our short time on this earth in full support of the rich myriad of wonder and diversity expressed through us in this infinite possibility called life.

The book is an abstraction. The person standing before you is not.

Love is love. Love is not separation or division or privilege or a skin color or gender or sexual orientation. Love has nothing to do with how much money you have or do not have. Separations are the province of small people inventing small gods for very small reasons – so they can feel good about being separate and small.

Love is love.

read Kerri’s blogpost about PRIDE

Filed under: Body, Edges, Identity, Love, Metaphor, Perspective, Possibility | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

See Beyond The Numbers [on saturday morning smack-dab.]

Posted on May 28, 2022 by davidrobinsoncreative

200. The number of mass shootings in the United States this year to date. Heck, it’s not even June. Of course, I’m writing this a few days ahead so, at the very least, by the time you read this, 222 more people will be dead from gun violence since we are averaging 111 people a day.

What’s remarkable to me is how many bar charts and line graphs are available. How much data we keep and information we track, all made easily digestible through smart visual analytics and colorful charts. Murdered children and teachers and church goers and concert attendees and folks who simply went to the grocery store – reduced to an abstraction translated into a visual that’s easy for us to consume. Apparently, we’re adept at making the carnage-numbers pretty and consumable but not so accomplished at seeing the numbers as people – children and elders, parents and friends. Scrub it. Nothing personal. That way our leaders* can offer a few more antiseptic thoughts and prayers and we, for some reason, vote them back into office.

[*I wonder if our representatives were required to go to the morgue every time we have a mass shooting and actually see the damage a military grade weapon does to a human body, especially a small child’s body, if they might see beyond their personal ambition and lobby dollars. They might see murdered children and teachers with names, and parents. I know, I know, a stupid idea. Were they required to experience the reality, they’d have little or no time to legislate. 200 morgue visits in 5 months would certainly be a full time job. With ample time to lead or no time at all, it seems the result is the same.]

read Kerri’s thoughts on this saturday morning smack-dab.

smack-dab. © 2022 kerrianddavid.com

Filed under: Perspective, smack-dab, Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

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