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Keep It Pure [on DR Thursday]

Posted on August 10, 2023 by davidrobinsoncreative

I have favorite paintings. I do not love all of my children equally. Yet, to my great dismay, many of my most treasured pieces get nary a second look from viewers.

When I’m approached by someone interested in buying a painting, Kerri has an uncanny knack at predicting what painting the person will buy. Even if they approach us with a piece in mind, Kerri will squinch her nose and say, “They’re not going to buy that one. They want this one but they don’t know it yet.” She is almost always right.

In one famous case, I was about to destroy a painting and she stopped me. I disliked the painting to the point of embarrassment. “It’s gorgeous!” she cried. “Some one will want to buy that painting!” she insisted. I scoffed but let it live another day. Two months later the piece sold. “See…” she smiled, triumphant.

We’ve been hard at work reimagining and rebuilding my website. It’s coincided with the making and remaking of my resume. Two life reviews from diametrically opposed perspectives happening at the same time. That’s a lot of navel-gazing. I wanted to blend the site, make it a place to find my performance work, books, and organizational/coaching path. Kerri was adamant that I NOT do that. “Keep it pure,” she said. “You’ve done the other thing before so if you want it to be different, then do something different this time.”

For a time I was conflicted. In my moments of I’ll-never-work-again-panic I want to unload all of the possibilities on any potential employer. “I can do this, and this, and this, and this, too!” My my, aren’t I valuable.

We were walking our trail and I was embroiled in the inner debate when we stopped so Kerri could take a photograph of the flowers. Bright, beautiful, warm yellow sunburst from a dark brown center. They are what they are. No apology. No embellishment. No lobbying. Happy. They stopped us in our tracks. It was the Black-Eyed-Susans that convinced me that Kerri was right. Keep it pure. Keep it honest. Keep it simple.

“I am what I am,” I thought. Kerri is right. Mine is not to determine or argue for my value. Mine is to put my work out into the world as honestly and simply as I am able.

visit my new site.

read Kerri’s blogpost about BLACK-EYED SUSANS

like. support. share. comment. many thanks!

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Be An Instrument Of Peace

Posted on August 19, 2017 by davidrobinsoncreative

I asked Kerri which of my recent paintings most accurately represented me as an artist. I was building a new website and wanted my home page to highlight a single painting. Without hesitation, she said, “The one titled, He’s A Stubborn Pain In The Ass.” I’d have protested but I knew my protests would be drowned out by her gales of laughter.

When she could breathe again, she said, “Use ‘An Instrument Of Peace.’ It’s the painting that best defines you as an artist. It’s what you bring.”

I am always excited to enter the studio to work because, for me, it is a place of peace. It is THE place of peace. And, as such, it is the place of clarity. When painting, my mind is silent. Peace is a quiet place. It is dynamic, immediate.

It’s a paradox that I enjoy. Peace is more practical than paradise. It lives beyond the turmoil of story and ideals and points of view and resistance. It lives beyond thinking and striving in any form. It is methodical-miraculous.

Horatio and I have often talked of entering the studio and disappearing into work, of becoming present. In other words, we stop ‘becoming’ entirely and simply ‘be.’ The epicenter of the paradox: creating in the absence of striving. It sounds like an ideal, doesn’t it? It sings like an impossible hippie aspiration or a Bob Dylan lyric. The Buddhists have a shorthand phrase for this practical peace: chop wood, carry water. In other words, it is not found in what you do. It is enlivened by how you are within what you do.

Krishnamurti wrote that if you want peace in the world you first must be peaceful. The phrase, Be Peaceful, is appropriately redundant: you will be peaceful if at first you learn to BE.

The trick, as someone once taught me, is to make all the world my studio. After all, it is not the place, not the studio. It is me. I can’t think of anything I’d rather bring to the world than to create as an instrument of peace, to –maybe- be an instrument of peace.