Bricolage

February 8, 2023

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.

bricolage, mixed media, collage. painting fragment photograph

Glimmerings

January 27, 2023

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?

Without Sin 30” x 45” mixed media & oils — Without Sin
30” x 45”
mixed media & oils

Whispers & Incantations

March 30, 2021

(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!

Anchoring the Art Mind

April 3, 2019

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.

THOUGHTS. WRITINGS. DETRITUS.