Hitting That Proverbial Brick Wall You may have hit a brick wall in your painting There is a weak part of the wall only you can find That is where you will find your breakthrough Painting isn't easy No one said it was If all else fails Paint the wall Cover it with something unexpected Or knock it down

Brew a Cup of Tea When the world is squashing your soul brew a cup of tea and in waiting for the tea to cool to a drinkable temperature has the sensation of the crushing changed? If not, it will when you pull the cup to your lips

Ephemeral Matters My brushes dip Themselves into brighter Pools of paint Splash like they are having fun Bristles glued to the ends Of sticks Do the business of picking up Setting down color They have no concept of fun That heart that sends the Hand to grasp and dip There resides the engine of happiness

Sufis said: "Nothing is ours but what we can save in a shipwreck" Would that we could gather all we desire we would become ever larger gigantic snowballs heading toward the fate of all gigantic snowballs My life needs fewer not more things to carry off during that final shipwreck Better to carry these things in my head They may seem heavy but are no more than bits of electricity

Pretending to Write It looks like I’m writing, but I’m only pretending. My mind is elsewhere, dealing with more important and pressing things. For instance I am cooking. Now I’m eating. At this moment I am cleaning up instead of sitting down and hammering out the words. Once the cleaning is finished another significant distraction will fill the time I might have better used for writing. So it goes. I am sweeping the floor, brushing the dog, milking the cat. Oh, I meant giving milk to the cat. Pouring a shallow bowl of milk for the cat. What? She’s not lapping it up? She sits there looking at me like I’m stupid. She’s looking right through me, telling me that only in cartoons do cats drink milk. Why am I pouring milk for her? Am I just wasting time? The dog comes over and sucks the bowl dry. When it reaches his stomach I will have more to clean up. I am online researching why adult cats shouldn’t be fed milk. I’m pretending to write. I’m really doing something...

I Like What You Are Going to Say This is not to say that I liked or did not like what you have already said. No, and it doesn’t matter if your words were true or false, whether you treasure them or abhor them. The words you have spoken or written are in the past now. If you brought them up again you’d be repeating yourself. Even if they were new to me they would be old to you. Why not move on? Let’s be forward thinking. Oh, and be positive, while we’re at it. Let’s speak of the future and be optimistic. Willful projection, that’s the ticket! Create with words your coming experience. Some like to use the phrase, visualize. Visualize your outcome as benign. Shape your words, like a sculptor’s hands forming a thing of beauty that was within the stone or clay, waiting to be birthed and beautiful. What you say next is what I have been waiting to hear. I already like what you are going to say.

He Calls Her “Sweety-Pie” (a cloud poem for Henry Darger) Diving into and through the paper She passes easily between the fibers and is already there, on the other side of the paper waiting for me Again, she sinks through the surface to the other side, chasing a cloud chasing the wind. She calls the wind by it’s name He calls the wind by her name He calls her “Sweety-Pie”

The Cave and the Tangled Wires You May Quote Me: "A clean studio is a sign of boredom." As you have not been in my studio, I thought it might be worth explaining a little about the environment in which I create. I have three studios, the papermill in a warehouse, the stand alone brick carriage house, and the cave-like etching studio in a cul de sac in the basement. I call it the cave. This is where I work. Even the long gone dog was afraid to travel the dark corridor to enter the studio. Lucy, the cat, loved the quiet and sat on a stool as I worked. She was from time-to-time a muse. My cave is below ground with a small window open on the side garden. Although the dog wouldn't follow me into the cave, she would sit amongst the flowers and watch through the window. The interior walls of the cave are white stucco over brick. On the eastern wall beyond my etching press are three notable elements, two of which you can see in the accompanying photo. The one...

Guillaume Apollinaire’s Bust The bust of Guillaume Apollinaire greets those who walk into this vest pocket parc that cuddles up against Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Russian emigres chatter on the bench next to mine. The back of Apollinaire’s head looks like a baked potato. One does not make vodka from baked potatoes. The Russians take another drink and I can tell the subject has changed, softened. They toss bread to the birds and the man who is doing most of the talking turns to one woman and speaks in English: "You are a tough old lady a tough old girl" I look back at the potato head

The Dancing Washing Machine The washing machine was agitated, or rather shaking violently, rocking erratically during the spin cycle. It waltzed itself across the laundry room and wedged the door closed. No one was getting in. The machine had left the door ajar just enough so the human could see that this was deliberate. What we had here was a very upset laundry appliance, perhaps over worked and under appreciated. It seemingly mustered its energy into an act of defiance, not realizing that blocking out the human who dumped dirty clothing into its orifice negated its reason for existence. The human was prevented from entering. No amount of pushing against the door succeeded in opening the door. There was no way to pry the door unshut. The human thought of desperate measures, such as getting a chain saw and cutting through the door, climbing through the hole and man handling the bulky machine out of the way. It would mean finding someone with a chainsaw and buying a replacement ...

Your Apartment Building Inside you is a towering apartment building. There is always room for everyone. Everyone you know lives here. Everyone you have ever met lives here. No one dies or moves out. But some are forgotten.

The Fish Bicycle ”A Woman Needs a Man like a Fish Needs a Bicycle” I saw this message on every self-respecting woman’s refrigerator a long time ago. Sometimes it was handwritten on a notecard and taped to the appliance. I know it was also popular as a refrigerator magnet. The fish + bicycle has been around a very long time. Yet long before I saw the magnet I read and listened to John Cage’s Zen koans about monks (men) and women. Amusing myself, I conflated the well-known refrigerator magnet with one of Cage’s short pieces for my own delight. Perhaps you may find these too silly, annoying, goofy, dumb, or possibly fun. I mashed them together and let the pieces fall as they may. Listen to Cage’s voice: “Kwang-tse points out that a beautiful woman who gives pleasure to men serves only to frighten the fish when she jumps in the water.” ...and now my vandalism: A beautiful fish which gives pleasure to fishermen serves only to frighten the bicycle Whe...

Ah, That Girl with Wings I climb the stairs with what always seems like thousands of tourists wanting to see that painted girl who smiles They look for signs or ask guards and they search, only to stand in line for a short glance. I ascend the long wide staircase, the girl with the wings waits at the top, on the stone prow of her ancient ship where she has alighted to signify victory. She greets me and I know where I am From here I take a left and climb more stairs Then enter the gallery of massive canvases Gigantic Engines of Color My personal mission being to view Delacroix's freshly sparkling " Death of Sardanapalus", hence the detail.

The Other Side of the Road Too much of the time And far too frequently My feelings are the squirrel Who tried unsuccessfully To make it to the Other side of the road

How to Draw a Chair The flint pathways of the Jardin du Luxembourg provide a seemingly endless drawing surface for the numerous chairs which abound in the park. This is a superb place in which to learn how to draw a chair. The chairs are all painted the same pea greenish color. There are several types, some with arm rests, some designed for sunning or napping, all are constructed of hollow metal tubing with slats to sit upon. These slats while not designed for this purpose, also collect pigeon poop. The chairs make delightful drawing gadgets. Unlike a pen or pencil that deposits a single line upon paper, the chairs may make four marks simultaneously with their four legs on the “sketchbook” of the flinty paths. One can draw, aka “drag” a chair with one or both hands, most frequently grasping the back rest. One should avoid lifting a chair to reposition it, one should always drag these chairs to incise or “plow” grooves, cut furrows, into the dust of the path. While drawing ...

It is True, What John Cage Said John Cage said that that there is no reason to wait for inspiration. There is no time for it. Writers write, painters paint, and composers compose because that is what they do, it is who they are. It is what we do. Unwind, relax as seven paintings, each fifteen feet wide, ever so slowly reveal themselves.

In Praise of Ephemeral Glory There is a simple, and unpoetic I suppose, answer to why the first of my Geometric Kimono Suite was named A Morning Glory . No one has asked, perhaps because the flat disks do not look much like Ipomea purpurea, the common morning glory. The inspiration is that growing up the flowers I most admired were both blue. One could be gathered and brought indoors, Centaurea cyanus, the bachelor button, also called cornflower. They were humble flowers found even in vacant lots. I would often gather a fistful of bachelor buttons to present to my mother who would arrange them in an empty milk bottle. The little blue flowers looked lovely, lasting for days. My other favorite, the brilliant blue morning glories, could not be put into a vase. They had no stems. The cornflower and the morning glory are beautiful, simple flowers, but represented opposite ends of the spectrum when it came to fragility. As an adult I grew both flowers near my studio, how coul...

Where Do You Find Your Muse? For me, a muse is a bang on the ear that dumps fermented apple juice into my brain. Or, if not apple juice, dopamine buzzing like a bad ballast in a flickering fluorescent lamp. In this simile, the urge to paint or write are triggered not by furrowing my brow in deep thought, but by that promise or inkling of a hormone rush that is evoked by an uncommon event. That event may manifest itself through any of my senses. A smell or sound can suggest more than hunger or a desire to dance. I have been disarmed by smiles and frowns, scowls and sighs, or a cluster of startling words, often misread. The beauty of inspiration is that it pumps a taste of the pleasure reward directly into the brain, and a flood of it after the act of creation. Now, there is where the similarity to sexual stimulation and the blessing of orgasm make the comparison credible and not judgmental. I find muses everywhere, or maybe not everywhere, but I have learned to pay attentio...

That Which Lasts a Day Sometimes the ephemeral is the truest reflection of life Everything is fleeting when you think about it Celebrate beauty while you can

Something Andy Warhol Said I spent my fifteen minutes on handmade paper kimonos and fans shown at galleries run by men who would fall in the first round of a new and deadly affliction. Other galleries also shut their doors long ago, for other reasons. So, my quarter hour slipped away, as it does any way, leaving ghosts of the handmade paper kimonos and fans in the odd museum or on eBay. The art, in small letters, remains in drawers, as old VHS tapes upon a closet shelf. I am transferring my tapes to the Cloud and onto large old-fashioned canvas. Perhaps some curious curator will open a drawer at the Met, or Brooklyn Museum, where my prints snore. There is no iron clad rule that we get but one fifteen minute time slot. It was only something Andy Warhol put into words in 1968.

The Three Muses of Poetry Sometimes he sits quite motionless Blankly pensive trancelike And yet nothing happens Or too much comes all at once And there is no bucket large enough To catch it all In either case, he can always Blame the Muses of Poetry He draws a blank on their names But the really good muse of poetry Carries the attribute of a lyre Which hints at the reciting of poems Rather than their reading Flat on a page in a book The muse of erotic poetry Also carries a lyre, but bigger And more erect This muse and he have fun The muse of short poems hides Behind trees and carries a cell phone Years back she carried a boom box Today there is a shortage of Real authentic muses Or possibly a glut Still nothing interesting Sexy or humorous is destined To be written down this day It was the muse of painting That had him by the balls Again this morning ...

Wood Butcher I butcher words with all the flare and thoughtlessness of a concrete worker setting wooden forms slathered with steric acid, release goo that separates the wood from the concrete as it mutates chemically from a fluid to a solid. My father was a carpenter whose skill spanned the spectrum of activities of that class of worker who builds forms for the foundation of an ice arena to cutting dovetail joints for jewelry boxes made from a hickory tree he’d harvested. His collection of saws and hammers were never displayed on pegboard like trophies or some hobby workshop other dads would vanish into on weekends. Dad’s tools were jumbled in a toolbox he’d made out of scrap lumber. All his tools bore the scars of use and the abuse of being hauled in the back of an old pickup truck on a bare metal bed, bouncing over dirt roads to a job site, which is not to say he didn’t care for them, he just worked the hell out of them. Dad’s hammers made it clear to me as a kid ...

On the Feeding of Parisian Birds Ecoute bien mes petites oisoux Like the cat who does not live with me You cannot count on me to feed you To toss stale bread or offer bowls of water As I am only passing through your life as you Pass through mine If you catch my eye by the way you flutter past And I reward you with a morsel, or don't, That is just the way it is for us both

Big Blue Miracle Machine Clouds, puffs of smoke, Creamer swirling in coffee, Tea leaves in an empty cup, A face in the flames, Visions in a crystal ball. When we catch sight of serendipitous patterns We are looking into a miracle machine. How completely predictable is our world. How completely random is our world. When one defines “miracle” it is usually said To be a once in a million occurrence, The unexpected. Something that shouldn’t happen. Examples cited are usually big miracles, Such as the dead come back to life. Smaller events, such as a snowflake falling In the Sahara, are every bit as miraculous. Take a quarter out of your pocket. Toss it into the air. Probability tells us that it will land On either the "heads" side or the "tails" side. If you flip the coin ten times it is supposed To land on heads five times and tails The other five times. This usually doesn't happen in a small test. But after a few hundre...

Fantasies on a Carnac Theme The Continuity of My Painted Carnac Series While I long ago walked amongst the standing stones in Carnac, it is not these erect boulders that spur me to depict them. It is the underlying concept of the creation of these row upon row of rocks pointing unexpectedly skyward that provokes me to my two dimensional fugue. Sixty-five hundred years ago huge boulders were dug from the earth and dragged some sixty kilometers to the site of modern day Carnac, in Brittany. Upon reaching their destination they were set into the ground in an unnatural manner. Gravity wants stones to fall flat, not point to the heavens. More than three thousand rocks stand in eleven rows. They are known as The Alignments. As with all prehistory, no recorded story exists. How long it took the massive boulders to be set in place is unknown. The task must have lasted generations, massive undertakings of long duration and cultural importance, predating such communal structures a...

The Parson Weems Tale of Helen Frankenthaler You remember Parson Weems Who placed a hatchet In George’s mitt Helen chopped no cherry tree In Central Park I cannot tell a lie Yet took her box of colored chalk Clutched with baby fingers Drawing one line One continuous colored line All the way home On sidewalks and streets From the front steps of the Metropolitan Museum At Fifth and 82nd To the canopy of her Park avenue home At 74th Young Helen scrawled That single line Point six miles long Did her tiny back ache From bending over to draw? Eight skinny NYC blocks 82nd street along Fifth avenue To 74th where she made a right angle Then two lengthy blocks between Fifth across Madison And ending at Park avenue Would her parents have asked Where her new box Of chalk had gone? Parson Weems might tell us She used one piece of chalk Or the entire box But anyone who has used chalk On a sidewalk would know This tale is chalk poetry .......

Some Frown Upon My Stories Some dislike my stories Yet they admire my paintings Others look away from my visual art And prefer the words Rarely do others appreciate both The word jumbles and the colored splotches There surely is a numberless gang that Cannot stand anything I do Still, far and away are those countless beings Whom I have shared nothing with While he is appreciative of neither My cat likes being petted But, nobody doesn't like Sara Lee...

Dead Folk Talking About Painting Long dead and recently gone painters wave to me as I walk through galleries in this city each wanting to say something Their messages enter my eyes and I take from them what strikes me and always it goes into my pocket for future reference I look and in a sense listen with my non-hearing parts and each time note that I might or will make my own reply to these old painters I have just ordered rolls of heavy duck canvas to paint upon, unsized, big ass rolls, the same rough canvas used for sailing ships Perhaps one might in this century be painting on some aerospace fiber or on the air itself It might seem so old fashioned to consider applying ideas to unfurled cotton, as if painting on cave walls Yet, I ordered, via the internet, the thickest and widest roll of cotton duck as tactile and substantial as canvas can be and yes, it had been years since I rolled out a painting surface beneath my feet on the concrete wareh...

In the Back of the Local Pottery Barn His latest one-man exhibition was held in the rather large storage room of the local Pottery Barn. Refreshments were served during the opening. Lunchables and boxed wine were available at cost, in the alley, as the Pottery Barn had no liquor license. The Drawings and collages he had created were produced directly upon the kraft cartons circling the room, floor to ceiling. All sides of the cardboard boxes, not only those facing the center of the room, had been decorated, marked, painted, or drawn upon. Perhaps the number of boxes was more than a hundred. No attempt was made to obscure the lettering: MADE IN CHINA. The cartons were not empty, but heavy. Inside these decorated cartons remained the articles, goods, and saleable wares. Black stenciled labels indicated the contents. I picked up several boxes and peeked at the drawings on the underside. The value of each artwork included the cost of the enclosed products, at retail price...

This Quiet This is one of those moments when I am surprised at how peaceful the world can be How rare to not open my mouth and fill the air with the sound of my own voice I can spend these rare moments with my brain switched off, as it is when I am in the studio hovering over a blank sheet of paper begging to be touched Waiting patiently for those particular marks that may happen when The world hushes itself and I am looking

Laying Down Paint Hard Yes, high energy Like a performance Afterward Feeling drained But smiling inside Laying down colors During the output Of energy, you are Caught up in the flow You are not thinking About doing the dishes Or paying bills

Loose Pages Gathered by the Housekeeper I probably seem to be hung up on Pollock, right? The more I dive into his work the deeper the dive. That is due to several issues that Pollock created himself. For an artist of his time making fifty paintings in one year was being prolific. In most other years he did not produce many. So, fifty was his peak year of production. If one makes so few it would seem you could line up all fifty artworks and place them in order of creation. Then, once in the sequence of creation one might better appreciate his changes, his thought pattern, his growth, his development, his creative evolution. That should be easy, one would mistakenly think. One looks at Pollock and thinks there is nothing much to learn, it’s only about drips. Ha! Pollock made decisions that makes it difficult to grasp this sequence of creation. He stopped giving his works titles as they were an obstacle to looking at the painting. They blocked the viewer, by suggesting...

Paint Job The nice part of no Regular paycheck is: No confines No deadlines Sometimes the Only reward Is the way the Colors dry

The Ready Hammer “It takes two to make a painting One to paint The other To hit the painter over the head When it's done.” This quote was supposed to be Or so I thought Attributed to Renoir William Merrit Chase, the American Painter is quoted similarily "It takes two to paint. One to paint, the other to stand By with an axe to kill him Before he spoils it." I’ve never found the Renoir Quote in print It is possibly A fiction Concocted by an art dealer Or curator wishing to claim A role in the creative process The gist of the assertion Is that a painter applies paint And a second entity Genie or genius or Fiction Tells him when to cease What a curious sweet fantasy An artist creates something Out of thin air There is no one nearby No critic, no curator No hammer No hachet No axe No Muse swinging a club I paint alone in the studio A brush in one hand My other fist firmly grasping A rubber mallet

The Bunny and the Squirt Gun He was only four years old, holding grandma’s big puffy hand as they walked through the gigantic, yellow, canvas tent at the annual parish carnival. Outside were rides- a Ferris wheel, a merry go round, and small roller coaster. Oh, do not forget the pony rides. Ah, the aroma of ponies. Inside the tent were games - cake walk, ring toss, balloons and darts, and the game where he would soon win a live black baby bunny: the fishpond. The fishpond was a game of skill for little kids or maybe chance or was not even a game. Grown people never seemed to try their luck. Yet, he found it to be worthwhile. A woman put a bamboo pole into his small hands. He grasped it tightly. He had been fishing before. On the business end of the pole was a fishing line, really just a piece of string with a loop where a hook should be. He knew that real fishhooks could go through your finger and come out the other side covered with blood. This was kid-safe fishing, no d...