Cloud Noir Weekly

Lately I've been taking a harder look at physics.  Not that I can understand this subject that well.  But it has plenty to teach us.

Gravity is one area.  That, plus light, magnetism, electricity, time, space, matter, etc.  A big field of lifelong study.  Too big for most people, definitely including working artists.  I can only go so far, and then I'm bewildered.

What can it all mean?  How can I apply these lofty concepts to my small world?  

For instance, it seems like time, gravity, distance, and matter come into being nearly simultaneously.  "Before" the so-called Big Bang everything is unbelievably dense, meaning no time or space exists.  Only pure identity.  

Does that make any sense?  To me it does.  In a way.  It's like when two lovers are fully together.  Time and separation barely appear.  They don't have to speak.  They are even beyond unity.  They aren't pulling at each other.  Gravity isn't necessary. They simply are.  

Also, I've decided to retire the daily blog.  Starting soon it will be the weekly blog.  Not as potentially dull.

I'm thinking about pausing the daily blog.  I wanted to make posts for a year.  I've just checked and realize that I've already done it.  I started this project last October, not missing a day, and now it's November.  So I've gone past the finish line.  

Just as runners after hitting the tape don't immediately stop as if they were smashing into a brick wall, I may as well keep writing a little longer.  

Two traits real artists have: extraordinary patience, and exceptional versatility.  Both point to a great hunger for supreme achievement.  

A couple of modern examples: when everyone else wanted to call it quits and go home to bed, Jimi Hendrix stayed in the recording studio and kept tinkering with his songs, determined to perfect the version.  Or Michael Jackson, no matter how many takes the video director demanded, the singer always could come up with a new one.  He never bothered to repeat himself.  

One more photo of Hannah and Dante.  Taken from her scrapbook that she left in the studio.  It really captures the essence of their lifelong relationship.  Maybe we underestimate how lovable half-siblings can be.  

I've noticed that my thoughts are becoming clearer and more interesting lately.  I'm not sure how to explain this.  It's a little like coming to the end of digging a long tunnel.  Bits of light can be seen through the dark earth.  And the shoveling gets easier.  

Answers to big, even the biggest, questions can eventually occur.  After a lot of work, searching, studying, meditating . . .  

It might be due to putting in the effort.  Even for years.  Sometimes.  That's how it is with me, but I don't imagine it's particularly that way for others.  Yet, I do have my eureka moments.  More than one, actually.   

Here's the thing: we really are different.  Similar but necessarily different.  You may be vastly more intelligent than me.  The difference between a skyscraper and a thimble.  But your towering understanding cannot grasp all of me.  Something will elude you.  Something is forever beyond you, and your massive world of knowledge.  I am your limit.  

I've always liked Hedy Lamarr.  An ideal person with both beauty and brains.  Inventive scientist and a glamorous movie star.  The only one, as far as I know. 

I keep seeing this online: you can't step twice into the same river.  Ancient wisdom by Heraclitus.  But why is it viewed as negative?  Yes, everything is always changing.  But is that so hard to accept?  

This insight prompts us to become more adaptable.  Is anyone ever too flexible?  In tune with the staggering variety of changes we face.  

Either adjust.  Or go mad.

I only feel the same way once.  Thankfully.

This fact grounds my attitude toward life.  

To want to go back to what was good and pleasurable makes sense.  As long as it has something new to offer.  

But maybe it doesn't.   It's no longer fun.  Having reached its term.

Time to get the wheels turning.  Much easier, for all that. 

An earlier LA painting of Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake.  The actor's daughter called me and asked if I'd sell this one to her, which I did.  It was very inexpensively priced.  I was nervous about being sued for copyright issues.  But that was not a problem.

I have often wondered about this desire for repetition.  Why I want to go back to something.  Anything.  Say a restaurant.  Or listen to a song.  Or read a poem.  Or call a pretty woman.  
Or text her.  Or look at her photograph.  

What is the basis for seeking something over and over?  Is there a formula?  Why do the alley cats keep returning to my back door at a certain hour?  Because they believe I will feed them.  And they are right.  I do. 

We return to what gives us life.  Or we imagine that it gives us life, or makes life more livable.  

Vice versa, we refuse to go back to that which hinders our will to live.

I haven't seen much information about this phenomenon.  I'll examine it at length.  I think it's worth a deeper analysis.

Morning in the back of the studio.  A new painting underway.  

Here is a line of poetry that, for me, ranks with the finest ever created: "gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy."  

How perfectly it rolls off the tongue.  Easy to remember, and say over and over.  Even many years after the first reading.  From one of Shakespeare's sonnets.  But so alive today.  At this very moment.  

A line that reveals the path of artists.  They pour the precious gold of eternal values into the fleeting life of humanity.  Giving importance to thin, colorless days of laboring men and women. 

You need art more than art needs you.  Art shines through your passing existence whether you know it or not.  Just like sunbeams through flowing water.   

A photo of a Gandhi painting I made for my niece, Maureen.  I recall loading it in the back of my pickup bed.  While I was stopped for gas, a guy came over, and asked me if it was a self-portrait.

Lately I've had some insights into the way forward with the online situation.  I suggest that people might start posting more personal, original content.  Too often I receive in the mail, or on Facebook, or Instagram, stale, passed-around, videos.  Either that or some hackneyed quotation from, say, a movie star.  I mentioned this advice to one of my followers and received an angry reply.  Very touchy.  Some folks can be.  He must be ashamed of his imaginings.  So he keeps forwarding the most jejune stuff.

Dare to be yourself!  A friend once said "It isn't much, but it's mine."  Let that be your motto for your postings from now on.    

I am more someone else than I am myself.  But it doesn't have to be that way.

Become supremely personal.  I realize that it's frightening, but also very invigorating.  It's the one, time-tested, sure-footed, path to originality.    

I've spent a lot of time thinking about several ideas.  Constantly revising, expanding, trimming, adjusting them.  To what end?  I don't know exactly.  Probably to make better sense of my life.  

For example, the situation of unbalanced feelings one person has for another.  Mainly I look at myself and how I change.  I then try to see if anyone else experiences something similar.  That is, I wonder how universal I am.  

I started out with women loving them less than I was loved by them.  I often imagined that I loved them, but it was a raw, immature love that shouldn't even be called by that name.  It was generally passionate desire.  More selfish than not.

But as I've gotten older I now understand the pattern better.  

A youth is loved more than he loves, but a mature man loves more than he is loved in return.  I believe this is the movement of human reality.  

The longer I exist I move from passive to active behavior.  From depending on others to others depending on me.  From taking to giving, and from making demands on the world, to making demands on myself.  

The piece finally done.  It went through more changes than usual.  It actually looked quite shadowy yesterday after the sun set.  Even gloomy.  I must have felt the political mood of the country.  Darker than usual.  

When I photographed the painting outside this morning it was much brighter.  The colors had dried and lightened.  Kind of lucky, in a way.  

I had some realizations about the destiny of paintings throughout their long existence.  I once feared that the pigments I used would not hold up.  They might fade, flick off, crackle, and otherwise become altered.  

But so what!  Why must it always look like the day it was made?  Let it undergo some changes. Show some signs of what it endured.  Why is that so terrible? It may even improve the work.  

Time affects everything in this world.  I must stop worrying about the normal aging process.  In art, and in life itself.  

The newest multi-dimensional painting almost finished.  There's parts of it that don't feel right.  I should be able to take care of them today.  

I just filled out my ballot for the election.  I'm proud to say that I resisted the temptation to gum up this daily blog with tedious political claptrap.  It's been a year since beginning the journal and I've almost entirely avoided politics.  I've done so on purpose.  There's far too much of it going on.  Leaving little room, or none, for more important matters.  

What happens in government today is forgotten tomorrow.  

Who was running only a few years ago?  You can't remember, can you?  Of course not.  Because it's unimportant.  

You might recall the temporary winners, but none of the losers.  And soon the winners will be forgotten as well.

Artists concentrate on the timeless.  Or they're not artists. 

                     

A new picture of my only grandson, Amedeo.  He prefers to be called Ame.  Pronounced "ah-me."  Being a grandfather is a unique role.  I have to learn as it goes.  I had one grandfather, Grandpa  McCabe, who I knew quite well.  The other was dead before I was born.  I really liked my grandfather, and spent a lot of time with him watching boxing on television.  That's what I remember most.  How we'd score the rounds, on separate pads, and then compare them with each other, and with the official scorers.  Sitting in the den at his house in Iowa.  

Ame and I have no such time together.  We're made differently.  It's a different world, peopled with different concerns.  I certainly love my grandson.  A handsome, quiet, polite, talented, young man.  Not like I was.  No.  I shudder when I look back on my younger self.  

What is intelligence?  It must be a strong desire to keep learning.  An awareness of how far we've come, and how much farther we need to go.  A heartfelt, unappeasable,  hunger for the right way of being.  

                            

This old photograph of a boat doesn't seem to have much to do with me today.  But it actually has a fairly distant link.  

The "Alice" was a stern wheeler that operated on the Mississippi river in the late 19th., until the middle of the last, century.  Apparently it had eight staterooms for sleeping passengers.  And of course a crew.  It was around 180 feet long.  Almost two-thirds of a football field.  

Alice was my grandmother McCarthy, married to my grandfather Patrick.  He owned the boat, up to the time he died in 1940.  I never saw the Alice, or my grandfather.  But I knew my grandmother well and even made a crayon portrait of her that she kept in a folder on top of the living room piano.  

It was my first such endeavor, done at around age five.  I had trouble with the nose and flesh tones.  The adults didn't seem to notice it.  

"Just because a person is beautiful, that doesn't mean they're happy," I said to my daughter.  We were talking about a young model who jumped out of a window and killed herself.

"I agree.  Nor if they're rich."

"I'd say without insight happiness is nearly impossible."

You can be happy in the worst situation if you have a comprehensive, clear, insight into things.  If you understand life and death and the whole point of existence.  

On the other hand, you could be a powerful king in your castle where you have all you could want, but if you lack insight you might feel nothing but suffering.  

Even if you're completely stupid, and the ball bounces your way for a long time, it won't bounce that way forever.  And then what?  You'll be thrown for a loop, and plunge into misery.  You'll have no inner resources to light the way out of your mess.  

Insight can make a heaven right in the middle of hell.  And, if you can't see the ultimate reality of your situation, even paradise itself will only cause you pain and sorrow.  

A large part of my painting has centered on beautiful women.  They've been interesting and profitable as subjects of visual art.  I painted many of them for two main reasons: I like how they look, and they were easy to sell to others.  Auction houses can always find a bidder for a painting of an attractive woman.  This has been true for hundreds of years, and no doubt will be true in the distant future.  

But at this stage in my development as an artist I no longer feel the need to paint pictures of beautiful women.  I'm not even sure that beautiful art is my goal today.  Or if it is, then it's a very different kind of beauty that I'm after.  

I'm now trying to reveal an overlooked style of beauty in our contemporary world.  For example, the appeal of a typical urban environment that surrounds us.  But abstracted.

Half asleep at the wheel.  In our daily fog.  Beauty exists even there.  But hidden.  

I went to the scrap iron business yesterday, picked up some supplies, and stopped at the thrift store on the way back to the studio.  It was there that I found this unread, used, thick paperback that only cost a dollar.  I've already begun on it.

Anne Applebaum is an American writer, and a good one.  I tend to prefer non-literature when it comes to women authors.  They are very smart and expert researchers.  Ms. Applebaum knows her stuff.  I must say that her ideas mirror my own in several important areas.  She understands the key differences between the Nazi and the Communist systems, in particular the way they both viewed punishment.  

She notes the evil behind the phrase "enemy of the people."  How such a vague blanket concept can wreak the greatest harm on innocent citizenry.  

I've tried to ignore the current political scene here in the USA, and even abroad, but it lurks in the background, no matter what.  

A corner of the studio today.  Slightly gray and chilly, but only for a few hours.  Say what you like about Southern California but it's hard to beat the weather.  Especially when combined with the landscape.   And maybe the people.  Some of them.

But where else can you go?  After decades of living here?  The world is big, but not that permanently delightful.  No, not really.  What I've seen of it.  

Someone recently said to me "you've been in LA too long."

Uh . . . no.  

There are times and places where a person can't be for too long.  Running here and there finally doesn't do much.  Staying put feels good enough. 

The wear and tear of desperate venturing.  Not anymore.  My gypsy blood has cooled.  

Rome would have been fun in 1624.  London in 1724.  Paris in 1824.  Even in 1924.  LA is fine in 2024.

                                co

When it comes to art I am generally ruled by this concept: it shouldn't be too easy or too hard to create.

If it's too hard, it throws a spoke into my natural way of being.  That is, it'll either require too much money to produce, or take too long to complete.  Worse, if both are involved.  Which is often the case.  Anything, anyone else, makes, I can probably make something like it, too.  But whether I do it is a separate issue.  

If it costs too much to produce that means it'll have to be priced much higher to sell.  This causes a spike in my sales pattern.  It changes the whole way of handling my business.  I feel like a fish out of water.  

I prefer working at a customary tempo.  If something takes far too long to create, this will be a mistake if I agree to do it.  I'll become bored or fatigued.  I'll suspect that I've gone off the rails and ended in a ditch.  Better to not have begun at all.  

On the other hand, if something is too easy then it wrecks my tempo in a different sense.  I finish much too soon.  I'm left wondering why?  It feels lazy, unimaginative, and shallow.  I need to be challenged.  Low hanging fruit?  Anyone can have such things.  They have meager value.

The same principle seems to apply to lovers.  If a woman was either too hard, or too easy to be contented, she wasn't for me.  It only made me restless, and ready to pack my bags.  Something wasn't right.   Many things.

Happiness is shared, or it doesn't exist.  

My latest painting.  A combination of welded steel, silkscreening, plaster, and pigment.  48" x 48" screwed to plywood.  Much heavier than typical paintings.  Needs to be professionally hung, or simply rested against the wall.  

Yeah, it's a bit dry.  The message.  But truth is every bit equal to beauty.  When it comes to art.  

Who says truth is too abstract?  Truth can, indeed must be, a living reality.  A powerful hair-raising experience.  If truth doesn't shake you out of your boots, it isn't deeply true.  It's gotta leave you barefoot and trembling.  It's much more than dead facts.  Solid opinions.  Or right ideas.

Truth is volcanic.  It wipes off all trace of a smile on your face.  Truth explodes with the complete range of human thoughts and emotions.  And it's always new.  Brilliantly, gloriously, new.

People say you only live once.  Yeah, maybe.  Sure.  But that's like saying Mona Lisa is only one painting.  Or Shakespeare is only one man.  Or France is only one country.  That's true, however this one thing has thousands of parts.  Millions.  Billions.  

My one life is so varied.  It seems like a hundred lives.  

I picked up this edition of "The Idiot" last week and am almost through re-reading it.  After sixty years.  (A poor choice for cover art, by the way.)

What a difference.  When I was in my twenties Prince Myshkin seemed like someone else, but today I see how often I've acted like this fictional anti-hero.  I must have absorbed his character without fully realizing it.  

You can seem like an idiot if you are too sincere in a phony culture.  

But for all that I'm relieved that I outgrew Dostoyevsky's powerful influence.  I now see the novel as a little plodding.  

I'm still working on this newest piece.  I like it so far, but not wild about it.  I think it needs something more, especially on the right hand side.  Maybe a silkscreen with a few words.  Just to make the painting more distinctive. 

When you love someone with your heart and soul, the thought of them always brings a smile to your face.  But this doesn't happen that much.  When you consider how many people you've known.

The same is true about my art.  Most of the time I either frown or look confused when I contemplate my work.  If I love it, I don't have the purest, sweetest feeling about it.  It can bring me down.  Way down.  Even more down than a disturbing lover.  

I may feel passionately about my art, but that's not true love.  Far from it.  

I only made this once.  No idea where it is today.  I love the fact that my paintings could be anywhere.  And that the sun never sets on my modest art.  

Working on a new painting.  Feeling uneasy about it.  Maybe because it looks like an earlier version.  As if I haven't gone beyond myself.  Instead taken the lazy route.  Satisfied to become a naive student of my former self.  How crazy is that?  Heading to the wrong end of the piece of pie.  

But what actually is the wrong end?  The small sweet tip, or the wide large crusty end?  People can disagree about it.  Maybe there's no right or wrong end.  Maybe it's up to you to decide.  No logical arguing about taste

Bought this unread used paperback at a thrift store yesterday for a buck. 

Dylan Thomas.  The first real modern poet I read when I was still a teen.  Over 60 years ago.  And he was a revelation.  I could see immediately that he was a serious poet, and at the same time, that I didn't come close to understanding him.  But I also felt he was a mystery that I wanted to solve.

So what do I think about him today?  I've made some progress in finding more meaning in his work.  I've attempted to grasp him this way: Dylan Thomas is a poet of half-lines.  A poet of original phrases: two, three, or at the most, four consecutive words.  Of course in his most popular poem he's more direct and unambiguous.  But this isn't where he's strongest.    

These phrases often consist of a few words that have never previously been brought into contact.  When they touch, they cause a sudden spark.  This flash is the truth and beauty of poetry.  A key to the vision of Dylan Thomas, a great master of his chosen art form.  

Forget about understanding the entire theme of one of his celebrated poems.  Most, almost all, of them, can't be, or needn't be, converted into rational prose.  They're like a collection of titles to books that haven't been written, songs that haven't been sung, or films that haven't been produced.  At best, take a few adjoining words, meditate on them, memorize them.  And use them as often as suitable.  

Dylan Thomas should have received the Nobel prize instead of it being passed, at much later date, to his more famous disciple, Bob Dylan.  

The other day I wrote that I no longer enjoyed venturing out into the world.  As if it was time for me to wall myself inside my building.  Like some would-be Proust in his final years.  But this isn't the case.  I'm not cutting myself off from life.  I'm actually entering into the whole of it.  

All of me merged with all of existence.  

I understand how the entire world can become my studio.  In fact, this is what the world means to me.  It's all studio.  Nothing but raw material waiting to be transformed into paintings, sculptures, and writings.  

No matter where I go, or don't go, I open my senses to subject matter.  I can't move a single hair, an eyelid, or a fingernail, without encountering a possible painting.

This is my post-world moment.

I love reggae.  When I post a photo online that could take a song, I always choose a reggae tune.  Even if it isn't popular or a hit.  And from an obscure musician.  Possibly Jamaican.  

Art, and music, can help a person to stay young a bit longer, even when the body is falling apart.  Yesterday I talked with my daughter about how I now see the aging process.

"Some women say they're attracted to older men, but I never heard one say they're attracted to old men."

"Well, that would sound a little rude."

"Okay," I sort of agreed. "But my brother Mike turned 80 yesterday.  He's no longer an older man.  Now he's an old man.  Eighty is for me the line in the sand.  It separates older from old.  And why should the word old be automatically bad?  Even though it takes a few more years to fully realize what's happened.  By 83 you are aware that your eighties have marked you as officially old.  There's no longer any doubt."

An earlier painting.  There was a period when I used to ransack art history.  Today I'd rather add my own art to the world. 

Making art and making my life count are the same activities.  These twin movements are identical.  Both tend toward simplicity, freedom, and self-realization.  

Ancient wisdom tells me it's easier to get what I want if I keep cutting down on my desires.  Rather than enlarging them beyond all possibility of fulfillment.  The latter leads to frustration and increased suffering.  

Reducing the demands on yourself - your time, your money, your fantasies - makes much more sense.  At my age.  And experience.  (Don't worry, you're not missing anything.)

A young artist wants to spill out all over the place, like an overturned jug of wine.  An old artist loves his comfortable studio.

  

A new photo of my stepdaughter Alexis, who currently lives in the hottest of hot spots in the world.  The Golan Heights.  Israel.  My Instagram feed has almost nothing but picture after picture of Jewish reality.  Starting mainly from the Holocaust up to and including the Gaza war.  It's as if nothing else of importance is happening anywhere.  

Alexis will turn 60 in a few months!  It seems incredible.  No one can believe it  

I worry about her and her family.  A son is a soldier.  Others will be one soon.  Rockets are landing nearby.  A big mess.  I loathe war.  Especially those who view it as necessary.  Even desirable.  What got into them?  How did their brains become so snarled?  Don't they understand how ashamed they will inevitably be?  How they'll hate themselves for their misguided ways.  There's no preventing this terrible realization.  Just wait.  I suppose I should pity them.  

                                                 

There's some truth about the present.  How it's the key to happiness.  What good is the memory of joy?  Or tomorrow's expectation of pleasure?  What you hope for is as stale as yesterday's champagne.     

It might happen NOW if it's going to happen at all.  But the present - only a razor blade between past and future - doesn't always feel that great.  

Superficial types imagine that happiness must be a state of inertia.  Laying flat on your back and satisfied.  But this is too much like an image of death.  And happiness is anything but dead.  

The highest kind of happiness is the act of creating.  When thoughts of happiness no longer haunt a person.  Thinking of happiness is a way of being unhappy.  Pure creativity is happiness itself.  

The final pieces of the oil drum welded in an abstract pattern and painted.  

I think the colors are pretty good, especially the texture.  Maybe it's perceived by others, maybe the artist is the only one who sees it that way.  Artists always find more in their art than anyone else can discover.  They know all that is, or isn't, there.  

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: my idea of a successful painting is one that makes me hungry to start on another one.  To immediately continue the hot pursuit.  To have time for nothing else.  To rush out the door, tearing after the golden mirage.  

This small painting didn't fail me.  Watch my smoke . . .

,

I painted this around 20 years ago, I guess.  I took the image from a postcard I found somewhere.  And made a silkscreen out of it.  A young flirtatious Brigitte Bardot.  I made a lot of paintings of the famous French star.  She meant something to me.  I didn't even bother to develop it more artistically.

I suppose I was lazy, in a way.  I liked how a small image looked surrounded by blank space.  I could have cranked out many pieces along these lines, but I didn't.  It would have been too mechanical.  Too easy even for me who didn't twist himself in knots over such matters.  

I've always felt that being a full-time artist without any other means of financial support was hard enough.  No reason to add any more difficulties.  

Just make something, sell it, and make it again, but a little better.  And do this for years and years.  

That's plenty.  If you can take that path, and stay on it, you're winning in the game of life.   

A guy asked me to make a painting for him.  A portrait of Nina Simone.  He's a younger black man, and began by asking if I knew of her.  Yes, I remember listening to her songs on the radio.  I was surprised that it wasn't the first time recently that her name was mentioned.  I guess she's undergoing something of a revival.

He told me a little about her life.  How she fought for civil rights, was hounded and left America because of it, and also how she had a hard time because she was viewed as not pretty enough.  

The unfairness she endured made me want to paint her picture.  Which I did, and the guy apparently was pleased with it.  I was a little ashamed that I hadn't painted her image before since I was a fan of black women artists.  Maybe I, too, was prejudiced by these standards of beauty, in particular when it came to women.  If I was, then it's a real flaw that needed to be corrected.  Nina Simone was a great musician, and it's only right that she's bigger after dying than when she lived.  

There's a lot said and written about art and insanity, and how they're frequently found together.  If they are, in fact.  But there's not much attention devoted to the connection between art and hard work. 

Very little talk about the unceasing, sweaty, dirty, toil of artists.  How they often work to their final breath.  Doing unrewarded grunt labor.  And for no evident reason.  As far as the world knows.  

This doggedness, this obsessive, unrelenting, single-mindedness, is often viewed as actually crazy.  And maybe one of the chief reasons artists are regarded as lunatics.  

On his death bed, at nearly 90, Michelangelo, the greatest artist who ever lived, had to have his ragged boots peeled away from his feet.  They were fused to his skin.  And he wasn't even poor.  Just too engaged with his sculpting.  You might say joyfully, madly, engaged.

This is my latest piece.  I don't know if it's finished or not.  I'm not sure about the colors.  

I'm not sure about . . . being not sure!  

Is certainty a good or bad thing when it comes to your own art?  When I like a painting right away I often like it less in the future.  And the opposite is also true.  When I dislike my completed work immediately, I tend to change my views after some time passes.  

The same might be said about people in my world.  And about so many, many, things.  Everything is judged over and over.  There's no double jeopardy when it comes to life.  

It's intelligent to have doubts, but there are moments when you need to doubt your doubts.   

Maybe I should leave the painting as it is.  It's no disaster if it's abandoned at this point.   

I was walking across the parking lot after shopping for groceries.  

A dark haired young woman came up to me and asked if I had a second.  I then saw that she was holding a microphone.  I said okay and went with her toward a camera man, standing by a news van.

There was a shooting on the freeway yesterday.  A man died, and it was along the stretch passing through Boyle Heights, where I live.

The female reporter wanted to know if I was aware of it, and how it made me feel.  I said yes, I heard the helicopters circling for hours.  And no, it didn't make me fearful, nor would I be changing my attitude toward anything.  

Later I watched the segment on a local TV station, with a few other people being interviewed.  I wasn't shown.   I realize that I didn't tell them what they wanted to hear.  Apparently I don't represent the frightened citizens of this community.  I'm too relaxed about the occasional murders.  

Me cutting up the oil drum.  It went pretty fast.  I knew what I wanted to do.  Now I need to assemble the final pieces into a pattern and paint them.  I've been working slowly but managed to reach the end of this creation quickly.  This is something I've always wished for.  It's taken many years and thousands of hand produced objects to arrive at this point.  

I'm very open about the way I go about things.  I've sometimes wondered whether or not this is a good thing.  I don't have any trade secrets.  I'm happy to explain anything to anyone in my life.  The only mystery about me is that I have no mysteries.  I'm as open as the air you breathe.  People have sometimes found this to be a little uncanny.  And have avoided getting too close.  (Or have been prevented from coming too close.)  I see why this is so, but it's not enough to make me change my evolving style.  

Here is the oil drum cut into smaller flattened pieces on a 48" x 48" sheet of plywood.  I'll weld and screw them down after painting the arrangement.  So far, so good.

As I work I meditate on some opinions about art.  There's a famous saying of Gauguin: an artist is either a plagiarist or a revolutionary.  

A very pointed remark!  

Art students begin by copying antique models.  From there they progress, and eventually can become full-fledged artists.  Or not.  Either they move forward, stagnate, or completely quit.  An artist, according to Gauguin, is always and forever a rebel.  They go beyond copying.  Refusing to copy others, or themselves.  

This plagiarizing phase may last a few years, or a lifetime.  That is, what the public calls artists are in fact only clever imitators.  Not passionate freedom loving spirits.  

But at any moment a copyist can choose to take the high road of creativity.  It's a hard, necessary, step.  

Me, unloading a used oil barrel, from Dante's pickup.  I brought it into the studio and cut it into pieces.  

I've had a lot of thoughts about this latest style.  Is it worth it?  Is it something that will be developed?  Or is it just a detour of the moment?  

But it does have possibilities.  And it fits into my current style.  I like using steel, either for paintings or sculpture.  I also need to keep the cost of materials down to its most practical level.  At $25 a drum this is a good deal.  Plus 20 gauge steel is easily cut and welded with my tools.  All in all, it seems like a good path to take.

I noticed at the factory they have a big pile of blue plastic oil containers.  They'll no doubt replace the carbonized steel barrels in the near future.  So, there's that to consider.  How much longer will the rusty drums even be available?  And at rock bottom prices.  Probably ten years, but by then I more than likely will have croaked.  Or, if still around, I'll have another idea.  I change more quickly than the world changes.  Like most artists.  We shall see . . .

(Man, I look like an old grizzled manual laborer.)

Today is my brother Matt's birthday.  He sees it in football terms: the beginning of the fourth quarter.  He's now 75.  I also like to view human life as something designed to last a tidy 100 years.  But so few arrive at that predestined goal.  How come?  

Philosophers point out that nothing is as unnatural as a so-called natural death.  You no longer see this as much in the newspaper obituaries: an old person died "from natural causes."  There isn't such a thing. 

Keeping an eye on the current movement of the hurricane.  It's one of those events that restores your faith in the relationship of cause and effect.  People tend to question this concept in their daily lives.  When they're being told of a future happening they often say "well, you never know."  Everything is so unpredictable.  

But this isn't always true.  On some occasions you do know.  

A hurricane is coming ashore and you can bet on it.  Make no mistake: it will arrive.  Don't kid yourself, friends.

Dante's art looks even more impressive when four smaller pieces are assembled and framed  to make a single large one.  

I love how skillfully she blends vintage imagery with present day themes.  Especially how she uses snapshots of her family.  

What else?  The latest storm is forecast to land almost precisely where we lived and enjoyed ourselves for many years.  The northern tip of Longboat Key at our good friends' property on the gulf.  Judith's house is a little south in Sarasota and set back a bit from the water.  It should be spared.  It's a really solid structure built in 1928.

Sometimes you leave a place just before disaster strikes.  But on other days you aren't as lucky and step right into it at the worst moment.  I don't know if anyone is blessed with a life of perfect timing.  It's easy enough to hit the mark for a while.  But not forever.  

Too often it's out of the frying pan, and into the fire.  

Sometimes it all hits you right between the eyes.  And it leaves such a crazy impression.  Like when  all the colors blend into an odd whiteness.  

This is what I'm feeling since waking up today.  I'm sensing the reality of the whole business being swirled into a seething unity.  This coming together of opposites - love and hate, good and bad, darkness and light, positivity and negativity, and so on.  It's the complete picture of the evolving universe.  

Even if you know it's the truth, it's different from experiencing it in the living cells of your brain.  

A fully conscious person is freed from the crippling error of the absolute.  Shallow certainties melt into vivid doubts.  Everything partakes of everything else.  A very detailed sliding scale begins to measure your existence.  

I could write, paint, or sculpt, about this vision forever.

I received this in the mail this morning.  From my step-daughter, Alexis, currently living in Israel.  Tomorrow is the day when her father, my friend, Howard Wolf died one year ago.  October 7, 2023 will surely be remembered for several reasons.  Especially in Israel, but also throughout the entire world.

Howie, mercifully, did not see the horror of this tragic day.  As if his body and soul could no longer bear to know about the criminal attack.  One more depravity visited on the long-suffering Jewish people.   

I always enjoyed our many conversations over the years, even when Judith and I were no longer living together.  

I often ask myself what is family?  Who is family?  And what in the fullest sense does it mean?  Family is more subjective and individual than I once thought.  It's unique, like fingerprints.  A very flexible reality.  There are as many families as there are human beings.  Maybe even more.  I suppose I have several families.  Possibly three, four, or five.  All intersecting, and growing.  

So much to contemplate . . . 

Face it, there are times when it all seems like a vast crock of shit.  I can feel that way, but usually just for moments. They soon pass.  Not whole years, or longer.  Just dark flashes.  

This is how I see it.  Waves of nausea, followed by cresting heights of gladness.  Up and down, over and over.  The unavoidably cyclic nature of existence.  Even bad luck runs out.  There's no stopping the throbbing engine of time.  

But even if you have the keenest insight into reality, does that mean you are always happy?  I don't know, and not knowing might be the wisest course of all.  

Respect for the deepest mysteries of life.  

Accepting, embracing, and, yes, even loving, the mystery of mysteries is a pretty effective way of handling your strange, strange, strange, trip.  

I've noticed some online remarks regarding our sense of hearing.  That is, the difficulty people have in listening to others.  I know I've had issues with this.  I realize that I'm often thinking of my reply rather than paying strict attention to what someone is saying.  This can't be the right way to hear another's talk.  

"I noticed this about myself," I said to Dante.  "If I'm attracted to the person I hear them more clearly and actually remember their words."

"You mean we only pay attention to those we want to have sex with?"

"I believe so.  Otherwise we tune out, and continue with our own inner monologue.  We're essentially somewhere else, with someone else."

"I'm never bored around a man I desire," she said.

"Right.  I definitely recall the words of a beautiful woman.  And can quote them back to her even years later.  Which often surprises them."

I've never been pleased with photographs of the fused bronzes that I've made.  I like my photos of the paintings, some of the iron sculptures, and even the jewelry.  But not the miniature bronze figurines.

I'm not sure what the problem is.  They seem much better when you hold them in your hand and slowly turn them about.  They're heavier than they appear.  And smoother.  You don't want to release them.  I compare them to Japanese ivory carvings called netsuke.  Or possibly something by Faberge.  

Not only do they feel good, but they also look better. 

This one is really weighty.  I spent a long time on it and used up every scrap of my bronze.  I now have to sign it.  

It presents itself as a different piece depending on the angle from which it's perceived.  Strange.  

A big, small, art object.  

The bronze head is taking shape.  In the past I always finished these pieces in one day.  But lately I've taken more time in completing them.  It's a luxury to be able to sculpt in a relatively leisurely manner.  

But, to be clear, certain things need to be done very quickly.  Or they can't be done at all.  For instance, it's impossible to sequentially melt and form the bronze.  It must be worked nearly simultaneously.  Which seems like a contradiction.  You can't go about it like an old person ambling down the street.  You need to use rapid, practiced movements.  

I'm reminded of Michelangelo, who impressed his younger assistants, when, as a man in his late eighties, he hammered the marble with his chisel.  The great artist would "knock off a piece the size of your finger with each blow."  That takes superior know-how.  It can't be learned overnight.  Or without years of powerful, unceasing, effort.  

It's lucky for anyone to witness a master at work.  

I know it's hard to know exactly what you're looking at.  It's the start of a small, fused, solid, bronze head, made with an oxyacetylene torch.  Clamped in a steel vice.  

As a maker of things, I enjoy this particular activity more than any other.  Melting and forming bronze is something I taught myself how to do.  No one showed me anything about the process.  It's more mine than anything I've ever done.  

Why haven't I exclusively embraced the practice, and focused on nothing else?  I can't say for sure.  Maybe because of the small size involved, or the rising cost of the metal?  Again, I don't know.  But I do like this style of creation.  

I decided beforehand that I'll use up my available supply of bronze rods for this sculpture.  At thirty bucks a pound it becomes pricier every year.  When I began working with this material it cost around three bucks a pound.  It must be a major part of the reason why I switched mediums.  

The present piece should look very different by tomorrow.  Just wait and see. 

I'm reading a book where the author keeps mentioning how he's afraid of dying. 

"I just want to exist."  He repeats.  Especially when he visits the cemetery, or sees a vase filled with the ashes of a friend.  It scares him.  To no longer exist.

But, logically, rationally, isn't this a strange fear?  A fear riddled with contradictions.  If you no longer exist, how can you be frightened of anything whatever?  You can't feel, think, or be, anything.  Nothing.  Pure and simple.  

On the other hand, to exist in a state of suffering is something that could worry me.  Or to exist in a never ending state of pain: this would be an unnerving idea.  That could get under my skin.  For sure.  

To not exist isn't worth thinking about.  But a suffering existence that doesn't stop - that's something that can cause some concern.  

Am I getting to the bottom of the issue? I want to exist, for as long as I want, but in a reasonably pleasant state.  Immortal?  I don't know about that.  But longer than my life during this lifetime.  

I need to survive death.  And then I want to survive my survival!  

This is a painting by my artist brother, Matt.  He's eight years younger, and of all my siblings, we're most alike, artistically speaking.  It takes an artist to understand an artist.  He gets me, even if others, as close as we are, fail to perceive an important character trait. 

A personality is deeply colored by its gifts.  If you have that dye in your blood it will make no sense to those who don't have it.  I can't understand them, nor can they understand me.  Such is life.

But Matt and I have an easier time walking down the same path.  Seeing things through very similar lenses.  

I really like this new painting of his.  We have different styles, but a shared sensibility, agreeing about what is cool.  And what's nauseating.  Or what makes us happy.  

"If it isn't love - why bother to meet?"  Those lines come from a book I just finished reading.  By a Russian woman poet, Marina Tsvetaeva.  They could almost be a guide to contemporary social life, even though they were written 100 years ago.  Before the tragic poet committed suicide.  

Yes.  Why go anywhere unless it's out of love?  For me it's better to stay in the studio and keep creating.  

She followed that question by another remark just as penetrating.  "If it isn't a mountain, why call it love?"

Love, real all-around love, is a towering mountain.  And everything that a mountain means.  Lofty peak, struggling climb, dangerous descent, green valleys below.  And more.  Always more.  

The tormented poet knew life.

The third and final piece I made from the rusted oil drum.  Placed in front of the second earlier hanging art.   

It never occured to me to wipe out any unused trace of a found object.  Not as if such an insight is particularly noteworthy.  But it does mean something to a thoughtful artist.  It causes me to ponder any future objects I might create.  No more waste allowed.  Not in this studio.  

Of course it harks back to more art historically significent works by, say, Picasso.  When he made his famous bull's head by reassembling a bicycle seat and handlebars.  He used every part.  Not however every part of a found bicycle.  Just two important parts.  What happened to the rest of the machine? Dumped in a landfill?

A new rule for me: take a whole, common, everyday thing, and transform it into a whole, rare, artistic thing.  

Dante's newest work.  She assembled her four 24" x 24" pieces into a single 48" x 48" framed painting.  

It's a step up for her.  I applaud the progress.  

She prefers to prominently feature her family in her art.  Maybe it's something one does in the earlier phase, or maybe it's just natural all throughout the journey.  

Rembrandt never tired of using himself and his family in his paintings over his entire life.  Nor did he bother leaving his preferred hometown.  Some artists can expertly distill so much from so little.  They have plenty at hand.  Others have a more restless character and like to travel, and explore.  You have to be what you are.

I just finished a small sculpture, which I'll photograph later.