Not the Daily News: ordinary life

Poet William Carlos Williams wrote: so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.

Consider a yellow chair and a green shed.

In 1986 I pulled this sturdy oak chair from a dumpster on Franklin Street in downtown Manhattan. I carried it around the corner to my art studio and painted it black. Eventually, it was relocated to my apartment and painted red. Then it was moved to Colorado where I painted it yellow. It has moved with me several times. After leaving it out in the winter elements, its usefulness was exhausted. I placed it in the fire pit for a final send off.

Soon after my chair fire, Tim burned some of his older paintings found with water damage after a winter in the shed. A few days later he announced the need to paint the shed green. One thing leads to another.

One yellow chair disappears and another shows up . . .

We are quite happy to have this pop of color in our main room. After sitting in this yellow chair for a few weeks, I walked about Tim’s studio and noticed the appearance of golden hues in his formerly muted blue-gray-green-brown paintings. Hmmmmmmm.

He often states this about his work:

I am both inspired by the beauty found in the degradation of nature and concerned with the devastation to the environment caused by the manmade world. During this time of the Anthropocene, my painting represents an ongoing exploration of building textural surfaces of the warming planet.

More recently, that expression of the warming planet is the burning of the planet–fire.

As the earth experiences excessive high temperatures, often more than 100 degrees, our 80 something breezy days are a gift. Painting in the cool basement is a pleasure.

The phenomenology of yellow chairs and green shed reflect the lived experience of how ordinary life become art. The ordinary things surrounding us are the vehicle to experience the poetry of being here and the motivation to create.

I have been known to state this about my work:

My paintings are interior landscapes. The process of arranging and layering materials is a way to dialogue with my particular human experience in the time I am here. I see painting as an object or place for contemplation informed by memory, ideas, nature, and the senses. A former Art Therapist, I experience the process of making art as a path to healing and meaning.  

This recent painting evolved over several months and was created in a fairly methodical meditative way to reveal this diptych titled Nuance, a word that has been spoken more and more in the public sphere during recent months. We are living in times of outlandish events and discussions that do not always include the subtleties (nuance) required for better understanding. I came upon an image of a painting I made in the mid-1980s titled Coexistence. I see a connection between that one and this other more recent one.

Humans reside in the precarious space between the manmade world and the natural world.

Man and nature in harmony . . .

Sometimes nature wakes us up in the midst of the most idyllic surroundings. A couple posts ago, I wrote of a writing retreat I attended in Guatemala. My room overlooked a pristine lake surrounded by volcanoes–pretty impressive for someone who usually wakes up in the humble environment of western New York. I encountered a Scorpion there.

It hid inside my robe and stung me first thing in the morning on my second day there. Fortunately, it was not poisonous. Every culture draws symbolic meaning from this creature. Generally, all that I have read indicates that a scorpion encounter is an alert. Akin to the snake shedding its skin, a transformation of the past is in process.

Burning yellow chair.

I have been working on a collection of stories, Woman in the Mirror, inspired by a photo from 1993 . . .

I hope to have this available in some published form one of these days.

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