Learn The Trick [on Two Artists Tuesday]

Posted on December 29, 2020 by davidrobinsoncreative

It’s a problem when your dog is smarter than you. If I lapse into thinking that I am the master of my ship or that my opposable thumbs give me an advantage over paws, I find that I am somehow using my opposable thumbs to do the dog’s bidding. “Wait a minute,” I question, “didn’t I just give you a cookie?” The rapid tail wag overrides my doubting frontal lobe and the cookie finds the open muzzle.

We can teach DogDog almost anything and in fairly short order. We can rest a tasty treat on his paw and he won’t touch it until we give him the signal. Last week, Kerri taught him to balance a paper plate on his head. She’s taught him to sneeze for a treat. We used to spell the word E-R-R-A-N-D because he goes berserk if we say it – he likes to go on errands – he REALLY likes to go on errands – but since he’s learned to spell, we are forced to use an advanced eyebrow code, a series of knit-and-raised brows, like dots and dashes. I could warn the allied army of enemy secrets with my eyebrows. It’s insane though Kerri and I can now openly gossip at a party and no one would know we’re talking about them – though they might be curious about the sudden rise and fall of our strange facial twitches.

All of this is to note that Kerri taught DogDog to wear a mask. And, even though his dogga-ears are not made for masking, it took her less than a minute. With her eyebrow-Morse-code she sent me a secret message: “Damn!” she arched and bobbed her brow, “It’s been 9 months and human-beings-in-a-pandemic haven’t been able to learn this trick. Dogga got it in seconds!”

“Dogga is a smart boy,” I reply with twitches.

“Maybe if we gave people treats?” Kerri mused. Dogga wagged his tail.

My eyebrows fell silent.

“You’re right.” she eyebrow-coded. “Even tasty treats wouldn’t change the selfishness of people.” She ruffled his head, saying, “Dogga is a very smart boy.”

read Kerri’s blog post about DOGGA MASKS

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Savor The Simple [on Not So Flawed Wednesday]

Posted on December 16, 2020 by davidrobinsoncreative

If there is a single reoccurring lesson rippling through these days of pandemic, it is this: appreciate the small things. Savor the simple pleasures.

With our plate heaped with job losses, backs stabbed, broken-and-not-healing- wrists, parent-worries and COVID restrictions, there is ample fodder over which to fret. We do our share of midnight staring at the ceiling. These are the circumstances, the storm that whirls around us.

In the center of our storm we attend to the moment. We step on the back porch and breathe the cold air. We check the pond for sightings of Epic and Tiny, our frogs-in-residence. We watch the crows chase the hawk from the neighborhood. We laugh at the lengths DogDog will go to get a treat. With care, each night before retiring, we make-up Uncle Mortie’s Hotel, a blanket on the couch where BabyCat loves to sleep (our ample cat snores like a champ so it is no small pleasure that he chooses to check-in to the Hotel over crashing at the foot of our bed).

The smell of coffee. A close-up photo on the trail of pine cones and needles. A special rock. The color of the sky. Deer leaping through a field of sunset grasses. A 45 minute drive to Simple Bakery (a big adventure!) just to get a few pieces of flourless chocolate cake. And a macaroon to share on the drive home. Friends who go out of their way to send encouragement, to touch base, to say, “We are here.”

Life reduced is, in fact, a discovery of riches. Expansion in another direction. A practice of appreciation of “what is.” Sharing a single piece of flourless chocolate cake, the bounty of our adventure, just so we will have anticipation in the morrow, another piece waiting, a double- savor to share.

read Kerri’s blog post about FLOURLESS CHOCOLATE CAKE

IN SERENITY prints available at Society6.com

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Walk To The Fence [on Merely A Thought Monday]

Posted on December 14, 2020 by davidrobinsoncreative

“When people disliked each other or wanted to damage each other, they often did it through destroying the person’s harvest. This is the world of pisreoga.” ~ John O’Donohue, Anam Cara

Pisreoga is a Celtic term and lives beyond the reach of Google. It is ancient. The desire to do damage to others who are different or disliked is also ancient. Destroy their harvest. Define them as less than human. Erect obstacles to their participation or power. Starve them.

It’s exhausting.

In Rolling Stone, Wade Davis wrote these words in early August: “In a dark season of pestilence, COVID has reduced to tatters the illusion of American exceptionalism. At the height of the crisis, with more than 2,000 dying each day, Americans found themselves members of a failed state, ruled by a dysfunctional and incompetent government largely responsible for death rates that added a tragic coda to America’s claim to supremacy in the world.”

Four months on, now more than 3,000 Americans are dying everyday. Our death rates and infection rates soar while our government proves itself again and again to be dysfunctional and incompetent each and every day. Our citizenry is divided with several million growing fat on a diet of delusion and misinformation. Our insatiable hunger for misinformation – to believe the worst with nary a fact check or thought-stop – is our nation’s Achilles’ Heel. It poisons our harvest. Our gullibility poisons us.

What is going on? The world of pisreoga.

It’s a precarious community in which neighbors, out of vindictiveness, destroy each other’s harvest. No one thrives when no one can be trusted. Poisoning the neighbor’s harvest eventually – and always – blows back. All are poisoned. The harvest of a poisoned community is its unraveling.

That is what is going on. An emperor with no clothes. Red-hatted-screamers riding the Titanic of party loyalty all the way to the bottom; a nation goes with it. Oaths-of-office that mean absolutely nothing. Sowing the seeds of doubt and misinformation as a tactic to retain power. Useful idiots signing on to garbage lawsuits, undermining the very harvest they were sworn to protect, cheering for a bloated naked ego.

Pisreoga. A failed state. To obstruct. To do damage. To destroy the harvest rather than deal with the realities, rather than walk to the neighbor’s fence and say, “We have a problem. Can we talk?”

read Kerri’s blog post about WHAT IS GOING ON?

Filed under: Edges, Identity, Language, Merely A Thought Monday, Perspective, Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Embrace The Mush [on Two Artists Tuesday]

Posted on July 28, 2020 by davidrobinsoncreative

butterfly butterfly spread your wings copy

We walk almost everyday. We always have. We walk to clear our minds or to stir our creative conversations. Since we work together, we sometimes call our walks “meetings.” Neither one of us is good at sitting.

Lately, we walk as an escape or a pressure release. Between job losses and broken wrists and pandemic fears and aging bodies and titanic leadership failures and civil unrest and financial collapse and missing-family-because-it feels-unsafe-to-travel…there’s very little quiet mind space. We hit the trail and have to remind ourselves to slow down. Be in it, not get through it.

It’s a life reminder: be in it. All of it.

We walked across the busy highway to the trailhead and a butterfly circled Kerri and landed at her feet. She’s been having many butterfly encounters lately. They circle her. They fly with her, crisscrossing her path. This butterfly stopped her motion completely. It snapped her into the present moment. She pulled out her camera and the butterfly hopped. She followed and the butterfly hopped again. It seemed to be leading her. It wanted her to follow. Another hop.

While watching the chase I couldn’t help myself from thinking of the symbolism. A butterfly, the universal symbol of change and transformation, leading Kerri on a chase. Perfect!

Our world is changing.

The process of becoming a butterfly requires the caterpillar to cocoon and then dissolve into mush before reforming, taking on the new shape. There’s no way to rush through the mush phase. There’s no way to rush into a thing with wings. In fact, the arduous process of busting out of the cocoon is necessary. It takes time for the wings to dry and the struggle to get free of the safe house provides the drying time. That, and the what-the-heck-are-these wings-doing-on-my-body phase of new recognition. Fear of the first step affords a few more moments of structural prep.

Going to mush takes time. Re-forming takes time.

No one willingly goes to mush. People famously grouse about changing but avoid change at all cost. I imagine that if the caterpillar had any idea of what was about to happen, it would yammer on and on about its dream of flying but would run screaming from the very idea of cocooning.

COVID has us cocooning. We are going to mush. I can only hope my country is also going to mush. A caterpillar that attempts to ward off the necessary transformation distorts and does not live long. A caterpillar that attempts to control its change process is delusional. It will rush and step off the limb before its wings are ready. Another route to disaster.

We are going to mush. Losing the known form is not easy. Living in uncertainty is uncomfortable. That’s the point. Discomfort heralds change. It opens new paths of thinking and possibilities for experience.

Watching Kerri hop after her hopping butterfly, I found myself laughing. This is what mush feels like. I’ve been here before. There will be another side, a breaking out, a fearful flapping of wings. A timely leap and a discovery. Butterflies are also symbolic reminders to step lightly and with grace in times of change. There’s nothing to be done but take nice walks, breathe a bit slower and hop after photo-shy butterflies.

 

read Kerri’s blog post about the BUTTERFLY

 

 

feet on grass WI website box copy

 

 

 

 

greet the world ©️ 2011 david robinson

 

 

Filed under: Edges, Emergence, Identity, Pattern, Two Artists Tuesday, Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

See Anew [on Merely A Thought Monday]

Posted on April 20, 2020 by davidrobinsoncreative

baconwrapped pears copy

It seems that everything during the pandemic is a study of circumstance-driven-change. For instance, I am a painter of people. I’ve never been interested in still life studies. Even in school, I cringed at the bowls of fruit placed before us by the instructor. Shape, shade, blah-blah-blah. Give me figure drawing any day! Suddenly, to my great surprise, I am photographing big bowls of fruit. They are gorgeous. I’m thinking about a painting featuring fruit.  What’s happening to me?

The devil is in the pandemic detail. We used to go to the store everyday. We used to buy what we needed for the next 24-48 hours. There were no big piles of fruit, no explosions of color in the fruit bowl or waves of color rolling across the counter. Now, in the time of pandemic, we stock up. We are – like you – buying massive amounts of bananas and oranges and apples and pears. They are, to an artist’s eye, when assembled, simply beautiful. They are, I suspect to an accountant’s eye, also beautiful, but my thoughts stray beyond merely eating.

Beautiful.

We are also in a fit of food experimentation. To delay our need to go into the wild COVID world and shop, we comb the empty larder, asking “What do we have? What can we make with what we have?” We throw our random ingredient list into the Google pool and voila! Yummy options emerge. Bacon wrapped pears. Oh. My. God. It never would have occurred to my bear-brain to wrap a pear in bacon. I savored it. I moaned. My eyes rolled back in my head.

Beautiful. Delicious.

When you study change processes, you bumble across something akin to a rule. It goes like this: if you know where you are going, then it is not really change; it is controlled reordering of what already exists. It may look new but is really the same old wolf in new sheep’s clothing.

Change is what happens when you step into unknown and strange lands, when all of the old points-of-orientation are gone. Only then will you step into something new and surprising. Only then will you see without the old dulling filter. For me, apparently, change looks like a big bowl of beautiful fruit.

 

read Kerri’s blog post about BACON WRAPPED PEARS

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

banana copy

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Look Again [on DR Thursday]

Posted on April 16, 2020 by davidrobinsoncreative

EARTHInterrupted7.THIS ONEJPG copy 3

It’s all a matter of context. As it stands, this is the seventh painting in a series I call Earth Interrupted. This piece would not exist today except Kerri stopped me from painting over it. She likes it. I find it dark. Foreboding. Of the seven paintings, it is the darkest piece in the series. When I painted it, I didn’t know how to place it – I didn’t know its reference point. It wasn’t and isn’t comfortable.

I pulled it out of the stacks last week. Now, in this time of pandemic, I know exactly what it represents. Everyday in the news I see a graphic of the virus. It is dark and foreboding.  Earth interrupted.

In an earlier version of myself I spent a great deal of time trying to educate educators to this simple truth: art is not supposed to be entertainment. It can’t always be comfortable. In fact, it holds diminished value if it doesn’t sometimes challenge, sometimes upset, sometimes confront, sometimes incite. Art is powerful because it confronts us, asks us to question what we see and think and believe.

And now, looking at this painting that makes me uncomfortable, I find it necessary to listen to that earlier version of me. This painting is beautiful, not because it makes me feel good or takes me away, it is vital because it upsets me. It lands me squarely into this inescapable moment in time.

 

read Kerri’s blog post about E.I. 7

 

k&dbw backs website box_ copy

 

earth interrupted vii ©️ 2018 david robinson

Filed under: Art, Creativity, DR Thursday, Edges, Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Step Toward The Center [on Merely A Thought Monday]

Posted on March 23, 2020 by davidrobinsoncreative

chaos copy

We had this quote in the melange line up long before there was a pandemic. Now, it is impossible to look at this phrase without pressing it through the lens of COVID19. What might we have written in a less chaotic context?

One of the best lessons I was taught, is that we cannot control our circumstance but we can control who we are within our circumstance. The hurricane will come. The pandemic. It is possible in the midst of the storm to panic. To hoard. To blame. To resent. It is also possible to stand in a center, to share, to support, to reach. You are not your circumstance.

Sitting in his study that smelled of instant coffee, book dust and cigarettes, Quinn and I used to talk endlessly about chaos theory. Within the seeming chaos of a dynamic complex system there exists pattern, repetition, self-organization. Pattern, repetition, organization – these are words of order, not of disorder. Chaos. Order. We only know order relative to chaos. We only know chaos relative to order.

Within the Hermetic laws (and Newtonian physics, equal and opposite forces) there is the law of polarity. Everything contains its opposite. Or, said another way, what might appear to be opposite, is, in fact, two ends (poles) of the same thing. Order. Chaos. We cannot know light without the contrast of darkness. We live on a continuum. What we experience is simply a matter of degree on the continuum. There is always a bit of chaos in my otherwise orderly day. In times of chaos, we become very clear about what matters and what does not.

Out of chaos we self-organize. In the throes of social distance we are finding ways to reach and connect. We are prioritizing connection. I’ve spoken with or texted more people in the last seven days than I have in the last seven months.

We see it every year. The hurricane blows away a city and the greater community always shows up to dig in and help out. And rebuild. In chaos we organize to make sure everyone makes it to the other side of the storm. Initially, the coming chaos reveals the ugliest aspects of our nature. We hoard. We price gouge. We run to the far end of the continuum and hang onto the poles, mine/yours, us/them. But, sit in it long enough, and chaos always reveals the deeper truths. Interconnectedness is another way of understanding a continuum. We turn our focus on relationship. The space between. Your need is my need. We are not separate.

Order arises when we step toward the shared center and away from the chaotic extremes. We are not our circumstance so the question remains: who are we within our circumstance?

 

read Kerri’s blog post about CHAOS & BOUNDARIES

 

squarecat website box copy

 

*this photo of BabyCat is not doctored. I have no explanation for the ordered shape that our very large cat takes in the moments prior to creating chaos.

 

 

 

Filed under: Merely A Thought Monday, Pattern, Perspective, Seeing, Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

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