Since completing my 'A Year With Rilke' paintings last summer, I've been mulling over what to do next. I always have a long list of ideas, but for some reason this time around when faced with a new beginning, I just couldn't commit fully to any of them. I would begin and abandon. Paint a couple paintings and get discouraged. It has seriously been one of the most struggling times of my art career. I believe there's been a dose of depression following my sister's death in June impacting my frame of mind also.
I only recently gave myself a goddamn deadline. Because when all else fails, forcing a showing or an exhibition or making a real calendar commitment has worked to get me going again. I love love working with intention. It is so good for me to explore through paint something other than the painting itself. What is a poet but a person translated into poetry. The painting is always the medium, not the end-game. To mindlessly paint pretty things has never been my MO.
I don't know yet how or exactly when these works will be exhibited, if in person or only online or a combination of the two. Covid has taught me that even in times of lower cases and high vaccinations, people have lost their craving for viewing art in real life. A part of me wants to find a way to ignite that craving again. And another part of me is just as weary of it all as everyone else.
And I'm not sure of the series title yet either. Mysteries of the Rectangle was an early contender before things changed a bit. Duality / Polarity will play a role. Whispers was the most recent designation. What I do know is that all those things will evolve as I get to work painting. I've got a structure for the new work, some solid intentions, canvases and a lovely studio. A reminder of how blessed I am.
Here are the words of a poem guiding some of the newest paintings that speaks to polarity of space as well as the liminal.
(the painting is the August work from 'A Year With Rilke' titled the song we sing in every silence, 48x72" oil on canvas)
Between Going and Staying the Day Wavers
Between going and staying the day wavers,
in love with its own transparency.
The circular afternoon is now a bay
where the world in stillness rocks.
All is visible and all elusive,
all is near and can't be touched.
Paper, book, pencil, glass,
rest in the shade of their names.
Time throbbing in my temples repeats
the same unchanging syllable of blood.
The light turns the indifferent wall
into a ghostly theater of reflections.
I find myself in the middle of an eye,
watching myself in its blank stare.
The moment scatters. Motionless,
I stay and go: I am pause.
Octavio Paz