my front row seat on the dance floor of david’s studio affords me this unique opportunity to watch him waltz with his canvas, shift his weight from one leg to the other, lead the painting or let it lead him (much as i unintentionally do when we dance.) the images come to life. i can feel the pull in her neck, backward-bent in the beautiful flow of the tango, their faces raised to the sun in this morsel of TANGO WITH ME. i can feel their hands embracing, arms outstretched, reaching for their forward steps. the painting around them is magical and surreal, fantasy almost, just as a couple dancing is lost in the dreamy quality of their moving together.
ahhh. it is a privileged front seat i have. each time…watching another birth.
i visit this place everyday. the place of contemplation. of pondering. of remembering. of dreaming. of silent conversational prayer. this morsel of david’s painting CONTEMPLATION speaks to me and my need to sometimes go inside…to sort, to be grateful, to relinquish a hold on something negative, to wonder.
SOFTLY SHE PRAYS
there is a similar painting, based on a similar image…called SOFTLY SHE PRAYS and i adore this for its monochromatic approach, its gentle existence. conversely, this piece CONTEMPLATION is filled with color – the colors of life and vibrance, saturated with the palette we live in every day, the colors we don’t always notice as we walk by, missed in our efforts to move into the next moment. ahh. yet another reason to sit and rest and contemplate.
in the bins in the basement (and scattered in places around the house) are child-drawings and paintings, ornaments made of paper and glue and sparkly glitter, painted rocks of various sizes, necklaces of beads and shells, framed little scraps of paper with things like “goodnight mom” written in pencil and surrounded by hearts. The Girl and The Boy have marked time through their artwork (and also through their writings) and i cherish each saved piece. this morsel – the field in early october – makes me think of such pieces.
in the corner of a new piece on david’s easel i found this morsel. extracted from the painting it is so childlike in feel. such simplicity and innocence. it immediately brought me to open fields we have walked…where sunflowers gaze for just a bit longer and grass is still verdant and lush and there are wild red berries on the bushes along the trail. the sun is in our eyes and everything takes on a muted hue. i can smell the leaves burning from the farmer’s field far off to our west.
what is more heavenly than remembering an early october day from a reality-fantasy visual perspective? what is more treasured than the artwork of a child? what a delicious combination. just ask picasso.
i have a unique front row seat to paintings in process. running downstairs to throw in another load of laundry or seek out a tool i need, i will glance at the easel in the studio to peek at what’s up next…this time, the sketch of two people dancing made me stop. it immediately made me thinking of when we have danced in the front yard or the kitchen or out on the deck or on a mountain trail. i got lost in the tango and wandered back upstairs, no new laundry spinning in the washer or tool in my hand.
the next time i looked at the easel i found these two people emerging and color exploding off the canvas. i have learned, in this time of living with a brush-in-hand-artist, that this is the under-painting, a place that involves steps at which i often want to tell him to stop!wait!it’s perfect! sometimes he does – stop. other times he keeps going, for the vision in his mind’s eye is beyond what is on the easel and there is more to develop.
it’s a unique place in the front row. maybe more comparable to back-stage or the green room or the recording studio before “record”…a place of preparation, a place of reflection, a place of swirling beauty, a place of possibility, a place where the-painting-someone-dreams-of-hanging-on-their-wall is being born.
a few years ago, after my tealight-vessel-throwing-on-the-wheel experience, i felt like i still needed to express myself in another medium (other than music). as much as i adored the idea of throwing pots, the cost of the clay and studio time was not in direct proportion to my level of ability; it was time to put that aside till the budget was flush and i could return to the pottery studio without counting pennies. a tealight vessel (ok, there were a couple tealight vessels if you must know) and one lonely bowl were a total joy but it was clearly going to take some good-long-time to get better on that wheel. demi moore (in ghost) made it look easy. it is not.
and so i went to the art supply store and bought a huge canvas. the biggest one they had in stock. the kind with a deep side (1.5″). i brought it downstairs to the workroom and searched around for paint. since i am not well-versed in this area (to say the least) i selected a can of black paint and a can of white paint. both household paints. latex. semi-gloss. i searched around for one of the old brushes i had been using to paint furniture and i set up my “studio”.
day after day i would go downstairs to look at this spot in the basement. i could feel my excitement gathering. i had no idea what i was going to do with this canvas, but it was ready for me. until one day, indeed, i was ready.
i stood before the canvas and began to paint. i brushed on paint. i threw paint. i spattered paint. i painted over paint. time fell away and i kept painting. i’d walk away and let it dry and then return (this doesn’t take very long with household latex…long enough to pour another cup of coffee or glass of wine) and i’d paint some more. i’d stand back and i could see what it needed (at least what my eye said it needed.)
and then, i knew. it was time to stop. i didn’t know where it was going, but i did know when it was time to stop.
now, i can’t say if the cost of the canvas and studio time were in direct proportion to my level of ability, but i can say they were way less than what my heart felt. these moments, gathered together, a storm of inspiration, fed me.
this painting hangs in the hall in our house. when i sent a photo of it to a friend of mine right after i was done, scordskiii wrote back to ask whose work it was. i told him it was mine, laughing and apologizing for it. he was appalled by my apology and made me promise not to apologize again. so now there are a few more in the living room. arriving after these paintings all had their dedicated spots on the walls of what-is-now-our-home, david, the real painter in our house, said he loves them. i’m always invested in real art made by real people, regardless of the genre, so i love them too. not necessarily because of what they look like. but because of what they made (and make) me feel.
every time we get a text from david or molly with a picture of sweet dawson coloring i believe i see an artist-in-the-making. he is intense, all not-even-two-years-old of him. his crayons seem deliberate choices, his drawing coming from a place inside that beckons him to the paper, the cardboard box, the canvas. it’s innate.
charlie is a second grader. he practices batting every day. he has ground down an area of the backyard so much that seth thinks there will never be grass there again. charlie can cite all the players on the kansas city royals and their stats and he will narrate his own one-person ballgame in the backyard, an announcer with great animation and accurate details. such a small person with such a big passion for the game. it’s innate.
khloe, a teeny but mighty seven year old, would come up to the chancel each week and john would let her play the drum set. she didn’t pound, she didn’t arbitrarily hit drums or cymbals. you could see by the combination of joy on her face and an expression of concentration that she was pretty serious. she has the beat. it’s innate.
when my sweet beth and i talked on the phone she said, “i’m not sure how i feel about her going into music.” she was talking about her older daughter, who already has been cast as the lead in three plays this coming school year. i don’t think she has a choice. for emme, it’s innate.
each of us spokes-in-the-giant-wheel come into this world with something. something that is just ours. ours to do. ours to bring. it’s innate. already in us.
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as i am writing this, The Girl just texted to say she was driving off the pass and that she and lumi-dog had finished their hike in the back-country. earlier she had texted (as is safe practice for all back-country activity) to let someone know both that she was going to be out of cell service, off the grid, in the high mountains on a hike and where she intended her hike to take her. she is a conscientious hiker and boarder and i can’t tell you how much i appreciate that. and so, early early this morning, i looked up the hike she was taking.
the #1 hike in the san juans (according to my trail app) it was taking her on a giant elevation gain and to a stunning lake, the color of which i couldn’t describe by the picture, and evidently was un-grasp-able even by the people reviewing the hike. this was a place incapable of being captured by even a crayola 64-box.
that is what i love about our world. countless places we couldn’t begin to capture with crayons. no matter how many we could get our hands on.
the places that take our breath away. the places that give us breath.
on my piano in my studio is a teeny sign with a big message. it reads, “if you asked me what i came into this world to do, i will tell you i came to live out loud.” (emile zola) it’s a reminder – a reason for being. true for each of us, it’s unleashing the metaphoric crayon of our creativity, our thoughts, our knowledge, our gifts, our voices.
there is an extraordinary amount of power in those crayons..the place in the middle that we open…the heart from where our concentric circles start rippling out…where the crayon meets the page, the song is composed, the painter paints, the activist writes. “loud” (for the sheer sake of being loud) and “out loud” (simply having a voice) are two vastly different things. and, if you are paying even the least bit of attention at all to world events, we are privy to both in our lives these days.
after living all this life so far, i hope now that the crayons i pick will help to ripple out things that are good, things that consider others, things that are not hurtful, things that are fair, things that are kind. the power of a crayon unleashed that is “out loud” not “loud.”
along with the portable record player we take out on the deck, we have the you-remember-the-case-with-the-handle box of 45’s. with titles like sugar sugar and IOU and julie do you love me and….the side A of these records are the likely hits. but if you turn it over and play side B you can often be surprised by a song you like even more than the touted “side A” song.
when david brought up this canvas to photograph the painting on the front side, i was reminded of what we had seen when 20 so generously gave d a slew of his dad’s canvases. on the side B, his artist dad (richard “duke” kruse) had written, “welcome to the 21st century” on the back of the canvas he had so meticulously stretched. we laughed when we first saw it, but it remains a mystery as to why he wrote it; we can only guess…maybe he was bemoaning the loss of something of the 20th century; maybe he was truly welcoming the next. either way, we get it. we are both 20th century artists.
as a painter, david uses actual brushes to apply actual paint to actual canvas, a process that doesn’t necessarily need explanation, but, in the 21st century art world, isn’t necessarily always the trend. with computer design and sketchpads -aka graphics tablets- the feel of bristles can become foreign to a contemporary artist. what about the smell of the paint? the light from the window on the canvas? the spatter of acrylic matte medium on your clothes? the wooden brush handle in your hand?
as a composer, i use paper and pencils and erasers and a piano. i have a couple of keyboards that have traveled all over with me, but the piano that takes up an entire room in our house is my tool of choice. it is stunning how much time it took me to write a full score way back in college compared to the ease of scoring on the computer. if i made a mistake on the score, i had to -with my pencil and then calligraphy pen- redo the whole page. then i had to write out all the parts individually. the 21st century has advanced the ability to have a computer generate all the individual parts off one score that is online. pretty amazing and time-saving stuff. not to mention the “playing” factor. the computer program will “play” the part you write; you don’t have to. but what about all the pencil eraser dust that falls on the keys of the piano? what about the scraps of paper spread out all over the top? what about the feel of the action below your hands, the response, the whooshing sound of the pedal?
acoustic vs plugged-in, analog vs digital. kind of old-fashioned. that’s probably why i like to sit in one of the rocking chairs in david’s studio and just watch. and why he will come into my studio and just listen. we don’t need a lot of fancy stuff. he just wants to hang his paintings and i just want to sit at a piano on a stage with a single mic. pretty 20th century.
reverse threading 