The Sketches Never Stopped

My sketches have been piling up fast. It was only a matter of time before I would reach the last page of my sketchbook. Lately my drawings have been either simple cartoons exploring exaggerated aspects of reality. Proportion, color, perspective and the like. I like them but they don’t feel like complete pieces. More like brain storming sessions I got way too involved in.

Old Bones

The mind is infinite but the body is limited and this brings me a great deal of distress. Jerry Garcia once said “My brain has an infinite amount of capacity in there that I had no sense of. I didn’t know anything about it but there it was, and I’ve seen it I’ve not only saw it but I walked around in it, I had a million incarnations in it I lived and died in it I had experiences beyond anything I had ever experienced, more real than anything I had ever experienced in this world.” No matter how hard Jerry tried he would only show us glimpses into that preternatural infinity that rests behind our eyelids. No matter how hard he whaled at his guitar no matter how many amplifiers he could only crack the door. I feel like I could work my fingers to the bone with atomic zeal and not make the door budge.

Grandfatherly Advice

My grandfathers life is an enigma to me which has greatly Some of my more recent drawings were a series that refers to slogans that my grandfather would say to me in his late life when I was just a child.  My grandfather understood the potency of words and he managed to communicate a few things to me before he died. I was only eight years old at the time of his passing so the trauma seated his words deep in my subconscious. For better or worse I’ve taken these as words to live by.

I also made up some of my own slogans which I the think are pertinent to the state of things in general. I fear that the accelerating pace of events is going to precipitate a catastrophe. The effects of mass culture and mass media are corroding prudence. People are completely mesmerized in an unprecedented way by electronic communication. There are more fractures in our society than a broken china doll.  Its getting to the point everybody is the adversary to somebody. I fear publishing anything of substance because every opinion can be demonized. I feel like every word must be chosen with careful consideration of the future.

The Future

If you want to know how healthy a society is all you have to do is ask a beggar who has been at it for a long time, how generous are people? People are terrified of each-other and would rather stare into the digital abyss than have a real interaction. It has never been easier to ignore someone on  the street corner.

I often think to myself, what would I do if there was an afterlife where the departed watch over our worldly strife? If I knew if my grandfather was watching how would he want me to act. What would he want me to accomplish with my life. How would Jerry want his music to impact me.

Instead of burning up like Jerry, or working myself dutifully into an early grave.  I am going to take a respite, and let the the turmoil of my mind ferment into a strong strange brew for when I come back to art. When you spend too much time thinking and working on the artificial it can cause a disaffection for real things.

The next work I am going to produce will be photographic because it is less stressful for my body. I find ordinary photographs that capture things as they are to be boring. My preference is art that captures how the mind of the artist supposes things should be. I want to meld the ideas of impressionism surrealism and the method of photography

Conclusion

I once took a class in corel painter and my instructor was a zen monk before he was a school teacher. On the first day of class he introduce us to the caligraphic practice of ensō. The repetition and symbolism has made it one of my favorite meditations. its a perfect beginning and a perfect ending for this chapter of the story. I need to accept some wabi-sabi in my art and let it go.