Earlier this week I wrote about our visit to Arches National Park and the paradox of presence: it is only when we recognize how very small we are that we are capable of standing in the immensity of this moment, the present. I called it a joining. In her song, In A Split Second, Kerri calls it, “walking that thin line.”
It is possible to put down the list of to-dos. It is possible to stop dragging along that big bag of the past. It is possible to be here, where you are, in the immensity of this moment of life. Give yourself a gift, be where you are, and let Kerri help you walk that thin line.
IN A SPLIT SECOND on the album AS SURE AS THE SUN, available in iTunes & CDBaby
Kerri laughed when she made this morsel. “It looks like a bowling ball, doesn’t it?” she giggled. It is a slice from one of her favorite paintings, Joy. “I can’t believe I’m seeing a bowling ball!” her snicker bursting into a full laughter blossom. “Do you hate that I’m seeing a bowling ball?” she asked, struggling to stifle her chortle.
Before I could answer she had already launched into designing products. “Oh my god! It makes a cool pillow!” she turned her computer to show me but before I could see the pillow she spun the computer back around and was already dropping the image into the next design possibility. “This is fantastic!” she declared. “This cracks me up!” Her chuckle was infectious and I began to laugh. “It’s a great tote bag!” she howled.
I love watching her design.
The painting is called Joy. It is one of her favorites. Watching her do this design work is pure joy. It is magic. It is one of my favorites.
When I first began writing this blog I wrote everyday. I did not identify myself as a writer. It seemed an outrageous commitment to write every day and I wondered if I would be able to sustain it. I quickly learned that the opposite was true. I found that I had too much to write about. I found that the act of writing required me to pay attention. There was something to write about everywhere I looked. I was not only learning to write. I was learning to see.
I have always been a painter. Seeing is central to any art form but especially useful in the art of painting. You’d be amazed at the multitude of colors in everything you see that your brain blends into a single color. Yellow. Blue. If you can open your eyes and see beyond the dullness of expectation, the numbing of your mind, you will gasp at the riches of it all. This life is complex, intimate, moving.
I’m working on the seventh painting of my earth interrupted series. Prussian blues and ochre, reds and sienna. I laugh each day that I step into the studio and begin work on this series. “What am I doing?” I silently ask and laugh. The answer is obvious. I am sailing toward the edge. I am trying to find what exists beyond my horizon, my comfort zone.
These morsels, snippets of my paintings, are doing what my blog challenge did for me so many years ago: opening my eyes to new and unexpected possibilities. They are asking me to see something new and unexpected in something known. Or something I thought I knew. Kerri calls this morsel The Sun Rises In The East. It is under-painting, a layer of Earth Interrupted VII, which may or may not ever be completed. Voyages of discovery are like that. We’ll see.
I’m sure that accountants never sit at their desks and review their accounting of the past 30 years. Lawyers, I suspect, may review a case here and there but I doubt that they ever sit in a room, surrounded by all their cases, and consider them as a body of work. Artists necessarily review their work all the time.
Because of our melange both Kerri and I have been sitting in our studios surrounded by our life’s work, revisiting every era. She listens, pours through old notebooks, tinkers with pieces that never made it to the recording studio. I pull out canvases, flip through old sketchbooks, and portfolios. We compare notes. We share our favorites. We disavow our least favorites (“Someone else painted that and stuck into my stack. That piece is awful!”)
It is much more emotional than you might imagine. Each piece comes thanks to a potent life experience, a funny story, a period of loss, lostness, foundness, utter ful-fill-ment, the vast and empty void. We stare at what we achieved, we face what we aimed for and missed. We stand on the edge of what next calls to be explored.
It is not an intellectual review, a study. It is a feeling pathway, a conscious opening to experience in all its many colors. There is no rational sense to be made in what we do or have done. “Making art” is a dedication to feeling more. It is a love song.
BUT I FEEL MORE on AS SURE AS THE SUN is available on iTunes & CDBaby
I flipped a page and came across the notes I jotted during my last call with Horatio. I can’t recount the entirety of the conversation – it was vast. But the few notes I captured seem to say it all: Art is about the unity place; it is meant to pop open that place in people, or remind them…. Artistry is the realization of one-ness. It is a walk to the center of compassion. And, it is dangerous. It challenges boundaries. Danger and compassion are linked.
Art is necessarily dangerous. It absolutely challenges boundaries. It asks hard questions. It won’t cotton a lie (propaganda is not art). It points to common ground, shared experience and universal understanding – all things that require border crossing. It brings audiences to shared breath, relationship, the place of compassion. It requires the artist to show up unprotected and the audience to reciprocate in kind. In that space serenity is possible.
Naming paintings is problematic for me. I’ve never been good at it. Sometimes I bristle at it. People project their own meanings into the images I paint (as it should be) and sometimes the name I’ve given the piece gets in their way. A favorite quote from a Joseph Campbell lecture: “If the artist doesn’t like you he will tell you what the painting means.” At openings, when people ask me what the painting means, my standard response is, “What does it mean to you?” I like most people though most people dislike my standard response.
Nowadays Kerri helps me find names. I ask her what she sees. We talk about the paintings and usually a phrase or name that I like floats to the top.
This one is simple and obvious. Prayer. One who looks inward and entreats.
Horatio and I just finished one of our famous calls. He, too, is an artist [and film maker] and so I look forward to our all too rare and epic conversations. They are pot-stirring and life-giving. Today, among a host of other things, we talked about the necessity of letting go of the old story in order to move forward into the new.
Non-attachment. It is an artistic imperative (and spiritual practice). It is one of the reasons I love and appreciate Kerri’s total attachment to my paintings; I know my work is loved and in good hands so it frees me to continue stepping forward. I no longer walk this path alone. I have the same attachment to her compositions and trust my embrace of her work opens safe space for her artistic voyage to the edge.
Kerri treats the sale of my paintings more as a placement, a matching of hearts, than as a transaction. She’s helping me tell a new story even in the selling of my work. ” I hope you sell a lot of 50% off paintings,” Horatio said.
“Me, too,” I thought. In my new story that would mean a meeting of many, many hearts.
I have no real explanation for this odd Flawed Cartoon so don’t ask. I can only offer that I’m generally fascinated by that-thing-in-people that says, “stand your ground” even when the flag they plant will cause them great harm. Smoking, for instance. Insisting, “I’m not creative!” Arguments for stagnation, as in, “But we’ve always done it this way!” “Argue for your limitations,” Richard Bach wrote, “and, sure enough, they are yours.” Imagined giants.
I’m also generally in awe of that-thing-in-people that says “stand your ground” even when faced with a real giant. Remember 1989, Tianamen Square, tanks and the man who stood his ground? March For Our Lives. #MeToo. Real giants come in many forms. So do Jacks.
This Flawed Cartoon cuts both ways.
The only other thing I can offer is this: it’s a golden goose. There is no duck in Jack and the Beanstalk. Read the story.
Kerri just looked over my shoulder and said, “Duck.”
“It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” ~Pablo Picasso
Every artist knows that technique is necessary but artistry is not the application of technique. Artistry is transcending technique. Technique is tangible. It is possible to practice scales and study color theory. It is possible to grasp that different brushes do different things. There are bottom lines in technique, reductions and rules and complications.
Artistry is intangible. It is flow. It is expansive. It is simplicity and simplicity is so hard to achieve. It is one of those paradoxes I love to write about, the zones where truth bubbles precisely because it cannot be contained.
The first night we met Kerri played her piano for me. I will never forget it. This slight woman stepped up to her piano (she rarely sits when playing) and all reality shifted. She grew. She filled the room. I swear I saw her send an energy-root into the earth and she opened. What came through was…enormous. What came through was simple.
This lullaby, Kerri’s original piece, I Will Hold You (Forever & Ever) from her album AND GOODNIGHT, could certainly be played by a technician and you would appreciate it. Now, for your KS Friday from the melange, listen to what an artist can do. Sit back and give over to the simplicity.
Kerri and I had a few days off. I’d never seen Door County so we jumped in the car and headed, as the folks around here like to say, “up north.” On our way back we stopped to say hello to Hans the music producer. Kerri and Hans have been for years dancing around producing an album together. Hans is also an amazing cellist. He gave us a tour through his recording studio and invited Kerri to give his studio piano a try. She sat and began to play. He sat at his cello and joined her. My mouth dropped open and I started to cry. Artistry, when it is pure, does that to me. I found myself standing in a sacred space created by two consummate musicians who were simply doing what they were born to do. They had no idea I was stunned to tears. They were playing around. They were having fun. They played together for about an hour, Hans dashing in and out to get different instruments to noodle around with, Kerri playing whatever came through the channel. I sat in the corner and tried to keep breathing.
Always With Us [solo piano version, track 2]
No recording exists of that day. I would listen to it every day if it did. It was spontaneous and as holy and temporary as a sand painting. On the drive home I tried to describe my experience to Kerri and asked her why she and Hans had never recorded together. “It costs a lot of money to record, ” she said, adding, “and, nowadays, with people streaming music instead of buying it, there’s almost no way to recoup the investment. It’s better to enjoy the process, to have fun playing with someone like Hans.”
I remembered that day with Hans when we chose Always With Us for this week’s melange. It turns out that our melange conversation this week has been all about artistic process: stepping blindly, having faith, landing in pot holes, making bold offers, capturing moments, and most importantly, treasuring the relationship with “something bigger” that comes through when the artist(s) step out of the way and something sacred happens.
Earlier this week I wrote about our visit to Arches National Park and the paradox of presence: it is only when we recognize how very small we are that we are capable of standing in the immensity of this moment, the present. I called it a joining. In her song, In A Split Second, Kerri calls it, “walking that thin line.”
