About the tension, fear and mystery of creative practice...
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The Why of Poetry
I sat looking at the faces that had been meeting mine for the past four Saturdays....
In a Divinatory Poetics session, we read together—the poetry of masters, the masterworks of artists who have perfected their craft. We read them slowly—silently, and then aloud. Each individual voice, with its unique cadence and tone, feels its way through the metaphors and imagery, the fields of emotional color.
Then we write; without censorship or second thought, (as much as possible). And finally, we converse, wedding our voices with the language that inspired them. It’s an imaginal journey—and the landscapes we invoke together are so rich they often give me chills.
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Ask
ask questions.
a question is open and receptive,
yet articulating – it invokes.
this is the art of divination.
amidst all possibilities, it reveals a subject of concern,
curiosity, attention, attraction.
it reveals a prayer – the desire for a meeting or
an answering that reveals itself only
in the act.
it is revealed IN the working.
Bricolage
Bricolage. The word embraces me. It has the graceful awkwardness of my long limbs. It describes the curious jumble of thought, aesthetic accumulation, fragments, the bit of stripe, the ragged graphic, the pencil cursive interrupted, torn. It accepts the enchanting ordinaryness of my life. All of it worthy. All of it rich. All of it in dreadful disarray.
Look how that irritating shred, that meaningless utterance, goes just right there and sings.
Bricolage defies the tidy. Bricolage is collapsed sculpture. Bricolage is image in three dimensions. Bricolage is askance and askew with asymmetric angles. Inclusive. What else can i say? Depart.
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Glimmerings
There is a sense that things simply arrive or else have been there, waiting for me. There is a rhythm, each thing to its place. These elements of ephemera represent pauses; a place where I bent down for a closer look, an irrelevance that became relevant beneath the caress of my primate thumb. A place where the world stopped me, where stillness reclaimed me.
I want to be willing to allow it to remain a mystery, the reason for this absurd marionette, this playing-at-god: fragment- suspended between idea and material. How does this peace utter the particularity of a wound, the mission of this insignificant-essential Atom?
building a boat
Building a boat.
(after Mary Oliver - i think)
I have arrived.
And there is no land in sight.
All the warnings – caution and reason – don't reach very far
into the depths; that version of life where you know
what you’re doing, has a short chain.
I am tried-on, systematically burned:
flame runs up mouldy curtains and alights upon roof,
catches the near hills, gives birth to a sun.
Silver0gold lances graze the broken steeples
wearing the skirts of endless waves.
Pit bull lunges at shadow jolting coffee, woman, fingers-and-cigarette suspended behind. This is a shabby age.
A transitional age. Things are floating by. So I
just build a boat with the debris within reach.
Soul Retrieval (work-in-progress)
"Use your Imagination."
"Use your imagination". I never understood what was being asked, when I heard this in my young years – what it meant I was supposed to do. I suspected that I didn't actually have one - else I would certainly know what it was and what to do with it. So I fumbled and bumbled about, stalling and evading, ever-fearful more questions be asked of me, revealing the extent of my handicap.
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Across an Ocean
The Perfect Imperfection of Un-Inhibited Inhabitation
Imitation can certainly be reduced to a matter of copying by rote: breaking an action down into a series of steps, and reproducing them mechanically. Deliberate, explicit copying of single gestures, out of context, would be like this. But it can also be driven by a feeling of attraction which results, by a process that remains mysterious, in our apprehending the whole and trying to feel what that must be like from the inside – by so to speak 'inhabiting' .... (437)
Communication occurs (telepathic, empathetic, psychic etc) because the listener inhabits the body of the person ... and experiences what they are experiencing. (442)
~From The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by Iain McGilchrist
What is it then, that i am trying to inhabit? What is it in these things, the things that captivate me? What is this idea of 'stealing'? inhabiting the form of another, chameleon-like, to become the other, the god you desire.
...empathy is associated with a greater intuitive desire to imitate. (441)
There is an instruction I remember…
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On display at Public Eat/Drink in North Adams, MA
Texture, Time & History
I wanted to see how far I could take texture and what I might compose using old books. Old books have long captivated and haunted me: hand-bound, ink-imprinted on brittle, tissue, parchment pages; Times, Serif, Lawless, Black No.7. London, New York, Paris, Berlin. Fragments of thoughts on torn pages: gateways into the mind of a far-away other.
I took these pieces of history, these artifacts with their words and I thought of opening a window or doorway into a part of myself I didn't know yet. Openings take time: these took a couple of months – reveries of mind and material. Fragments showed through as I added or removed layer upon layer to the surfaces. Like memory or a slow recognition, bits of text, shape or color emerged like trail signs in a twilight wood.
When a thing is framed by space, no matter how ordinary, it becomes singular, intriguing, unfamiliar, perhaps even beautiful, seen for itself. Removed from context, it becomes a surface upon which to project our Self. We can enter and dwell within it, bringing a kind of vividness to the garage sale of mundane doings.
These paintings are abstract, non-representational, recruiting imagination and eluding rational orientations. I invite you to pause, dwell momentarily before one that takes your attention. Perhaps you will discover some sense of recognition or magnetism: a hue, the quality of an edge, a texture, the character in a shape. Enter that.
Visit the Gallery to see New Work now on display at
Public Eat/Drink, North Adams, MA.
Speaking out through the bare bones of space….
In Search of the Miraculous
Once you have become aware that you are not and still you are – that the ego is no longer there, the self is no longer there, yet still you are – you have a totally new experience of your own being. (Osho)
Sometimes i am blissful and so sure, so assured while I’m working. What is that? I suppose it is still a habit to equate result–aesthetic result–with proof of ‘success’? ‘productivity’? that I’m ‘making progress’.
Horrors! i felt such worthless despair yesterday as i regarded my work and saw so many problems...i had spent so long...and simply didn't like it - the look of it - the look of myself? in process?
Witch Going to the Sabbath 1957 Remedios Varo
Western Esotericism: A Guide for the Perplexed (book review)
Wouter J Hanegraaff’s Guide for the Perplexed is intended to provide a lucid and accessible overview of the relatively young (academic) field of Western Esotericism and the currents that gave it rise. I found the book to accomplish just that.
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Without Sin
30” x 45”
mixed media & oils
Whispers & Incantations
(Susurros y Encantamientos)
I like to work improvisationally and step back periodically to see what has arisen. When I stepped back from this two-month collection of works as a whole, what struck me was the colors – an unusual palette for me – Mexico brought color into my blood!
Palo Azul
Palo Azul is traditionally used as a kidney cleanser. In the Old Testament, the kidneys are associated with the inner-most stirrings of emotional life. In Chinese medicine they are associated with the water element, which when out of balance, manifests as fear or anxiety….
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Manifesto
The witch. What i am, what i do…is real. is enough. right now. with dirt under my ragged nails and my eyes bagged and of two different size. IS as the gesture, the effort, the being. That is why 'Witch' appeals to me. Somewhere, always, i know it is already true. I am already worthy. Here is not yet another endless self-improvement quest toward becoming some coveted projection. 'Witch' stands on what i already, inherently am, what I do naturally. I don’t have to spend the rest of my life reaching for what is ever out-of-reach; I am, in fact, beseeched, commanded, I am obligated not to.
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Apophasis & the Well
I found a pathway. Or made one.
Yes, made a pathway into being:
Picking and bending my way up the dried river bed–through thorns of doubt
“Time and Season” (on Table) and “Soul Retrieval II” (above left of table) by Regan
Intangible Art Show at #Local Gallery: September 14 - October 6.
Opening September 14th 5-8pm
Art Talk/Champagne Friday September 27th 6-8pm.
Come hear about the process, source of inspiration and how this art might serve a bigger picture this Friday at #Local Gallery in Easthampton, MA.
Excavations
That is the nature of the split in me. by nature i am dream-oriented. irrational, wordless, quiet, unformed. but i am also compelled to examine and explicate; it is also my nature to want to know why: to find meaning as the cliche goes. of late, i regard this latter aspect as a most certain liability – the compulsion of one who can’t stand emptiness: the inexplicable void-splendor-terror of being.
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Small Works Gallery Show
Unexpected Visitations
Practice is a frame into which I pour my mind. It is a method of alignment, a point of orientation. My practice sessions have a score: I mark the edges, define the area of inquiry, lay out aspirations. Yet an equal measure of unguarded territory is necessary. A door must be left ajar for unexpected visitations. In every session, I reserve time for improvisation. Improvisation is where seeds of the best work are dropped. When expectation is abandoned and agendas are replaced with listening, waiting and attention, this is when beauty that I could not have planned emerges. (From Voicings from Underground; The Slow World p 60)
Anchoring the Art Mind
Sit. Sumi Circle. Sit. I remember the instruction from a Contemplative Art class I took fifteen years ago. Sitting motionless, eyes soft, feet on floor, and the blank, white paper, ink, brush. Pause. Lift arm-brush. Dip. Inscribe circle, unfurl line onto white space. I am revealed in the mark: a collapsed edge, unmet ends, a blob, a waver, a dwindling scratch. Everything is in the weight of hand meeting substrate through brush. This is marriage. Commit.
What is at stake, in this circle, in this line? My great success? My immanent failure? The voices yammer on, yet, almost imperceptibly, they also begin to recede. There is so much in that ragged little mark, the quavery and dented circle.
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