trailer park art and creative purpose

"True happiness comes from the joy of deeds well done, the zest of creating things new."
 Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Seventeen percent of the housing units in New Mexico are mobile homes ranking us third in the nation outdone by South and North Carolina in that order.   The overall average in the US is eight percent.  I learned early in my life of a giant stigma associated with living in one of these homes especially when scores of them are stacked side by side with non-existent yards in collective “parks.” The potency of my parents’ commentaries planted this disparaging paradigm in me. But it lost much of its effect when financial necessity caused me to seek refuge in several such units and parks early in my life. The experiences served me well and the sheer numbers who are mobile home/trailer park dwellers give reason to notice and discover beauty where beauty is not expected.

Trailer park art is a theme worth exploring. I can envision the pieces: “Block Three Lot 27” is a Cezanne-like watercolor depicting some makeshift stairs leading to a rusting narrow metal door. Next to the stairs is a pile of crumpled beer cans and nearby is a pit bull tied with a frayed rope onto a car bumper.  “Contrast: lot 13 and 14” is an oversized detailed graphite rendition of an attempt by one creative voice to smarten her world by  placing several bunches of faded artificial roses in plastic pots on the railing of her tidy deck. Next door an unworking vehicle fills a littered miniature yard. “Drying on the Line” is an ink line drawing with a watercolor wash of laundry clothes-pinned onto a rope that is carelessly strung between an un-skirted unit and a small tree.

 A trailer park characterized by neglect is an image that evokes specific thoughts, judgments, and feelings. The observer might experience a spontaneous association with lack, laziness, filth, and low social standing that is mostly unconscious and unspoken or blatantly justified.  By bringing these images to the canvas, intentional and profound purposes may be served that extend beyond the limited pleasure or therapy the artist derives in the act of creating. There are intrinsic benefits that may be mined from these hypothetical works.

First, In his representation of the trailer park scenes the artist bestows the possibility of cultivating emotional intelligence in the viewer—the chance of an awakening sensitivity to internal reactions—the criticism, the revulsion, divisive assumptions, or social distancing are all potent illuminating responses that may arise in the act of even a brief silent and attentive looking. What is presented on the canvas has the potential of arresting attention away from an otherwise mechanical and benumbed response directing the observer to the gift of interior awareness and self-honesty.

A second purpose is the making of beauty from what is overlooked, minimized, repulsive, or commonly assumed to be non-beauty. Rembrandt’s Carcass of Beef comes to mind as a classic illustration of this. Something ugly and practical (a dead cow) is donned with the respect of excellent design, texture, and rich color.  One of my daughters gave me a letter this past weekend. It accompanied a book given to celebrate a milestone in my life.  In it she referred to some of my difficulties, doubts, and frustrations of several years’ duration. She stated that “one thing that remains and will survive is this drive in you to make things beautiful.” I think she is primarily referring to life situations more than a trailer park series of paintings and drawings, but her observation transfers broadly to all devotees of the creative process in innumerable venues.

The all-absorbing and mostly enjoyable nature of the creative process could easily translate as a self-focused pursuit. The benefits to the observer (or the reader, etc) are not automatic but cultivated and therefore not profitable to all. I find that I need to remind myself of the value of what I offer the attentive observer of my creation lest I forget my contribution.

creativity and unscrubbed toilets

“As a mother of five

(now grown) children, my proficiency in time management is well-honed. In recent years, though, I have tasted a maturity in this skill. Earlier in my life, my large hourly Day-timer was rigidly attended and any unexpected diversion met with a non-productive angst. As I have grown older, I notice an increasing ability to pick my battles and allow lesser duties to wait.”

This is an excerpt from a letter I finished on Tuesday. It is for a graduate program I hope to begin in January.

The “lesser duties” are certainly relative and in my case have a quotidian quality. They are the obligatory jobs of living here—bed-making, folding, dusting, diapering, etc. Most of my adult life I have sought to perform them with beauty and attentiveness and seldom with carelessness. I found them to be a source of satisfaction…mysteriously so.

Now, in another season and a fueled with a new passion that affords little time for these once high-priority tasks, I do not want to minimize the value of the ordinary. Contentment in the mundane has been the stuff of peace for me.

I have often imagined how I would fare in different situations of ordinariness or deprivation asking self -searching questions: Could you be content completely alone? Could you do this task for the duration of your life if it were required?  Could you function undisturbed with few material possessions? Could you walk out Victor Frankl’s experiences as he did in the Nazi death camps? If pondered, these foundational considerations  lend depth, honesty, and consciousness to one’s journey. I need to believe I am not running away from something distasteful, but transferring that careful attention to a fresh purpose.

I have friends with impeccably clean kitchens and orderly closets. Some of them are also people of passion and creativity and pursue those ambitions with excellence as well. Some have maids. I have yet to balance it all so successfully and a maid is not feasible.

As we pursue creative works with the kind of mindfulness those works require, then for some of us strange life forms may grow in the refrigerator, the laundry may stand in piles, the toilet may go unscrubbed, and  we may be misunderstood. A voice of shame will scream to be heard, but  I am thinking that “maturity" might respond with a convincing,  “Let it be.”

on teaching art…seeing and doing

“In middle adulthood, the challenge is to develop the capacity to focus on the generations that will follow…generativity…failure to resolve this stage will lead to feelings of stagnation, in that one has made no contribution to the world that will last after he or she is gone…” Erik Erikson, human development theorist

I think another distinguishing predisposition of Erikson’s “middle adulthood” is a healthy pondering on life-to-date. This may be because I am on the tail end of “middle” or maybe I am just a mature “middle”…..no matter. I think I would have been wise to engage in a bit more reflection in all stages of my adult life, but objective looking back for the purpose of moving forward well is hindered often by the blinding nature of our circumstances.

So, in looking at “life-to-date”, I want to waste no more time waiting for the right set of circumstances or the ‘perfect’ answer to offer clarity….In recent months I am as clear-headed as I have known myself to be concerning what resonates in me and what is deadening. Life direction seems to flow best when we follow what sings inside.

I am captivated when I paint. Nothing else matters….I forget to eat and my normal insistence on domestic order fades in a frightening manner. As much as I want and need to participate in this image creating, there is always a scratchy sense of egocentricity that calls me to a balance. 

I find that balance in teaching. I think that at least a part of my “contribution” (as Erikson discusses) lies in this arena. Teaching is an outflow of what is contained inside …as an artist these are the infinite lessons learned and internalized from repeated attentiveness to light, shadow, color, form, and nuance.

The movie, Local Color, is an entertaining testament to this generativity (and regeneration) potential of teaching. It is the story of an accomplished elderly alcoholic artist whose life is given renewed meaning when he takes on a young and eager student…

But to say, “I teach art”, to me, approaches arrogance. I think that the gift I have to offer students is not my ability to grapple with perspective, or the human form, or the world of color and mixing, or design. Granted, I need to have a working knowledge of these and these need to be shared. But the gift lies in facilitating students to see and to do: Seeing and Doing.

Seeing was not something I learned in school directly. It was not taught straightforwardly (as per Frederick Franck—in a previous post). The seeing is something most “artists” do but seldom seem to articulate clearly to the one who needs to know--the student. Once the student begins to see rather than duplicate or perform for others---once the seeing is experienced in its purity, doing “art” is never the same.

The “doing” is a bit more pragmatic and less mystical, but no less essential. Doing art (without drudgery) is the child of attentive seeing. Doing becomes the joyful and sustained response to the epiphany of a new kind of seeing. This responsive doing, when exercised with a degree of diligence, produces a lively art that evolves in satisfying ways over time.

Done. I did not plan to post here until after Thanksgiving, but was busting after an elevating conversation with some student/friends today. I am looking forward to next semester.

an unwanted blogging sabbatical

I had so hoped to post a couple of times a week back when I began in August. With my Fall schedule, I altered my goal intentionally to once per week. With more schedule additions, I am now hesitant to set a goal until after Thanksgiving. I am preparing for application to a graduate program --a process requiring forms and lots of writing and gathering of letters and on and on...

I am still painting. I am currently working on a commission for a floorcloth (look at the additions to my floorcloth page that I did last week).

As soon as I finish this rather large floorcloth--it's 3'x 5', I will post a picture.

world of detail

Bunter is an English Bulldog. He lives with me. It is late and I am sitting here at my laptop and he is busy digging into the kitchen cupboard that is home to my plastic storage containers. He is looking for a toy because he continually searches for playthings. 

Recently he was in the living room pouncing on some object of play near the window. The commotion was distracting, so I investigated and found that his “toy” was a bee. Bunter had killed it quicky without maiming (he’s much better at this than me) and was tossing it about the room.

I thanked him as I picked up the tiny insect body and added it to my collection of interesting things to draw and paint. I don’t mind working from field guides or photographs, but having the subject in hand generates an intimacy… a familiarity that is far superior to a flat photo. I ran a needle through the bee’s body and stuck it in a Pink Pearl eraser. Using a 10x magnifier with a light I began my study.

Study implies attention…absorption. Barbara and I were out walking last week and she told me how she really would like to take a year and really study just one author’s works. That would involve reading the books and the commentaries and then generating questions and feedback with others who have a similar focus. It would lend to a deep understanding of that author and the mind that birthed those literary creations. This same idea plays out well with paint and canvas….and a bee.

Under the lighted magnifier is a world of detail that is by and large valued by a marginal group of individuals like Henri Fabre and some friends (authors and fellow artists) who love to notice the underappreciated.

For several days I looked at the bee and recorded what I saw. I could not help but wonder if this fascination with my discoveries is much like the experiences of early naturalists like Fabre, Muir, and Audubon who studied and recorded the life around them. I think it is how we experienced life about us when we were toddlers.

Concentrating on a single subject…like a bee… to know it intimately and to record it well….not shifting to boredom…is a kind of contemplation or prayer that is transcendent.

I have loaded new pieces in several of the "pages" on the left.

ghosts in the studio

“Why is it that some children cannot joyfully dive in (to creating art)? There are a myriad of reasons, I’m sure, but the most common one I have seen in children and adults alike, is that they have become limited by being self-conscious of their abilities.”  Barbara Coleman

I like to think of myself as a person who is unburdened by others’ opinions. But frequently notice that I really do care and this concern is injurious to any vestige of creativity…in art, in writing, public speaking (or whatever form creativity takes). It all becomes stiff and lifeless. 

Putting my stuff “out there” is an exercise in humility, not a product of narcissism and ,hopefully, not too much a product of naiveté. (It is risky to the ego, but I am discovering value in a dose of ego mortification).

 I have been experimenting with a series of self-portraits born out of several  years  of private journaling…..some  of the drawings are imbedded in those very personal pages and I am redoing them as stand-alone images. I was sharing some of these recent paintings with a friend. He looked at them quizzically and then looked at me and said, “What are they for?...they don't even look like you." What a blow.

Crap. I really do care. He’s right I really don’t know what they’re for. I didn’t know they had to be FOR something when I play with them.

So, I stopped for a few days and cowered in fear. But quickly I resolved that I like these impressions. They are fairly good drawings. More than anything, the idea came from a good place in me. A friend on Facebook said they "are how you see you"(thank you, Laura). Without freedom of interior confidence there is no fearless originality. So, I am going ahead…..free of the encumbrance of that voice.

Barbara Coleman writes of “ghosts in the studio.” She says that those ghosts include her teachers, critics, friends, husband, gallery owners, favorite artists. I think those ghosts are ubiquitous in a much wider world than the studio. They have an almost physical presence.  So much so that it tightens muscles, knots the stomach, and constipates that needed “flow”  that  Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi proposes as “completely focused motivation.”

But, when I really paint—when I am kicking it in, the ghosts are gone. I think there may be no other way to get them gone except by proceeding as if they are not there at all. (a small glass of Merlot really does help…several of my non-alcoholic artist friends are firm believers in this)

I am proceeding with more of these (and other) drawings. I don’t know what they are for and am moving gradually to a place where it really does not matter at all….

I am going to start a new page "self-portraits" some time this coming week..

making art is hard

 “Artists get better by sharpening their skills or by acquiring new ones; they get better by learning to work and by learning from their work.  They commit themselves to the work of their heart, and act upon that commitment…making art is hard. Talent is a snare and a delusion.”Art and Fear: Observations on the perils and rewards of artmaking. David Bayles and Ted Orland.

In the summer of my freshman year in high school, I attended a national arts camp at the University of Kansas at Lawrence consisting of specially picked kids from across the country ages 14-18…. It was six weeks of intensive classes in painting, life drawing, and cartooning. I had been a big fish in a little pond in my high school and it was easy to be confident about my abilities…

…until I watched Diane work at her art.

Diane was my roommate. She had curly red hair and dressed like she did not care what anyone thought. She was difficult and arrogant. I did not like her but her facility in interpreting any object of her gaze was irrefutable.  She worked confidently and her pencil easily went to all the right places ..capturing nuance, shadows and gesture….maddenly adept. And it was not because she worked hard at it…she just had it…a rare (albeit obnoxious) natural genius. We managed the summer together via avoidance. She paraded her unfair advantage throughout the dorm. My stuff was stiff and hard won. Hers was loose and she could accomplish with three well-placed lines what took me a dozen.

 I never heard anymore about Diane after that summer. The dark side of me has imagined she got married to an Allis Chalmers mechanic, had half dozen kids, got fat and never drew again. I was altogether intimidated.

I think that my summer with Diane contributes largely to the healthy response I have to the silly conversations that invariably arise at shows or in workshops or classes. They almost always include the refrain…. “You just have talent” or “I wish I had that kind of talent”.  The myth of the potency and exclusivity  of talent absolves us of the obligation to work hard. It evades the need for commitment to work and is a “snare and a delusion.”

Diane had talent. Michelangelo had talent. Marty works hard. Most of us have to work hard.

martial artists—energy to create

“Energy follows attention.”

I credit these words to a friend. She didn’t give a reference. I think it may be a martial arts term. She was introducing them into a discussion we were having of an ongoing personal problem of mine.  They did not seem particularly potent when she spoke them. She asked me to bring them to bear on my weighty situation over the next week.  She told me that the more I allowed myself to focus on my dilemma the more energy I was giving it. By the time of this discussion my difficulty had already morphed into a decidedly energetic beast.   She suggested that I practice being aware of my attention and gently remove it from the problem and consciously place it in a more positive place. Simple idea.

But wrenching my attention away from this now alluring leviathan was accomplished in forced and painful increments over the next few days. Surprisingly, the practice strengthened upon each small turning until I sensed that the Beast was in fact being divested of power. This is a great lesson worthy of creative application to life issues  as they unceasingly present themselves.  With that said….

“After making the decision that my art, whatever form it takes…writing, drawing, speaking, painting….is worthy of my time, discovering how to insert that creative space of time into my day looms large.” This is the beginning of a previous post that I am seeking now to continue.

 “It seems that the energy of these (creative) people is internally generated and is due more to their focused minds than to the superiority of their genes.”…..Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi  in Creativity

I hold to the idea that creating is supremely necessary to being human and not an elitist or selfish endeavor. It is imperative. Because of this, I can unquestionly make space for creating to happen. I will begin to view the obstacles to creative space in very much the same way I deal with the “Beast” of my personal dilemma. I turn my attention to making space. I attend to its possibility. I turn attention away from the critic  and the pressure for anal tidiness. My attention is on the possibilities and those possibilities are energized.

attention to painting

My intention to continue the last post has been derailed in a good way. With only so much time set aside daily for creating, painting has won over writing for a season.
Let me explain the paintings I have been doing the past few late evenings. I have created a new page for these "honoring the lovely loser" accessible  on the home page index of pages.
"Theodore:honoring the lovely loser" is the title of this series of post-work, post-dinner quick paintings  I have been doing after everyone in the house is in bed.  This is not the usual me. I am an early morning person. Getting to bed after 10 is one of several radical decisions that speak death to old routines and a sense of normalcy...shaking up old stuff is something I need at this time in my life.

Concerning the subject of these paintings.... I am not seeking to be cute or pander to popular ideas..I am hoping for some degree of honesty in revealing what is deeply meaningful to me. The idea of giving honor to what is inconsequential aligns itself with previous posts about seeing well or seeing with a kind of third eye. The beetle is indigenous to southern NM...or at least to my front porch...where I found him/her and inhumanely ended life for the sake of adding to my stock of models.

Concerning the challenges to my painting style..."tight" would be a fitting adjective for much of my work..not that this is "bad", but in these paintings I am seeking to combine careful seeing with a looser hand.  So far, I am excited about the results.  You might notice the progression in that if , at a later time, I dated the paintings.

Concerning the name...It evolved from a Facebook posting conversation that was kind of organic. Naming work has always been something I have found distasteful and I usually let someone else do it.

I will post more as they dry.  I would covet comments and good criticism. marty

space to create 1

After making the decision that our art, whatever form it takes…writing, drawing, speaking, painting….is worthy of our time, discovering how to insert that creative space of time into our day looms large. It needs to be reasonably free from external interruptions and, even more, the internal ones. It is no wonder, really, that most don’t pursue these creative intentions especially if there is little or no financial gain. The practical usually wins.

On a recent walk I passed a small creek that was flowing under the road. I noticed that as it ran from under the road and down a hill, it suffered a kind of division. A small part of it went off to the left diverted by a rock. I say “suffer” because the mainstream lost energy and the diverted stream had so little substance that it was lost in the tall grass.

I like this divided stream metaphor for many reasons, but particularly when I am realizing the need to follow through on healthy intentions to create. I see whole days consumed with attention to many secondary activities that suck the life out of a resolution to find creative space. Energy is given to the urgent and the important is only sporadically realized. I am convinced that this dearth of space has allowed many DaVincis and Michaelangelos to live and die fruitless.

“Energy follows attention” (next time)

seeing/drawing and frederick franck

“Frederick Franck is an artist and author who believes in seeing everything around him… [this] does not mean simply looking at, but instead actively realizing the importance of everything around him, especially other people."- The Online Journal of Peace and Conflict Resolution


I am powerless over the compulsion to amass books (an adaptation of AA’s first step). I have walls of books and my chair is surrounded by several tall piles that are all urgent reads. Most of them are books that friends or favorite authors endorsed…people whose reading I trust. But some of them arrived mysteriously…I happened on them in a used bookstore or discovered them when I ventured down appealing rabbit paths while in the middle of a search on Amazon. Frederick Franck’s The Zen of Seeing: Seeing/Drawing as Meditation arrived in such a way—a kind of serendipitous gift.


“This book is handwritten because, in its way, it is a love letter, and love letters should not be typeset by compositors or computers.” Frederick Franck


Franck directs the reader/artist away from drawing for a result only and centers on the process that engages the eye, the hand and the heart. He opens the door to the inexperienced and the tentative to join encouraging us to “realize you are not ‘making a picture’. You are not being ‘creative.’ We are just conducting an experiment in seeing, in undivided attention.”


“Seeing/Drawing is such a way of inscape from the overloaded switchboard. It establishes an island of silence, an oasis of undivided attention, an environment to recover in…”      Frederick Franck


I think it would be truthful to say that self-promotion and self-consciousness are two distinguishing interior workings of the artist. Wanting to be liked and doing what it takes to advance that favor seems necessary to making the whole art gig work. (I think this applies broadly to all the arts). Franck sees these working against honest creativity and truly seeing… “a world that is fully alive.”


“Who is the man, the artist?...he is the unspoiled core of everyman, before he is choked by schooling, training, conditioning, until the artist within shrivels up and is forgotten. Even in the artist who is professionally trained to be consciously ‘creative’ this unspoiled core shrivels up in the rush toward a ‘personal style’ in the heat of competition to be ‘in.'"Frederick Franck


“Millions of people, unseeing, joyless, bluster through life in their half-sleep, hitting, kicking, and killing what they have barely perceived. They have never learned to see, or they have forgotten that man has eyes to see, to experience.”Frederick Franck


I have included some helpful links for more on Franck..in the "links" page to the left..

9/3/10...I just received a copy of A Passion for Seeing-On Being an Image Maker..looks really good.

boredom and scribbling

Cecelia (not her real name) was a dual-credit student between the college and a local high school. Granted, she was young, but she was also an honor student among her peers. She had 90 minutes to complete the assignment: a single leaf. record intricate detail. use graphite. I prefaced the assignments with a standard—“we are not looking for masterpieces, just a careful seeing and recording.”

Fifteen minutes into the allotted time, she was texting. She would go back to the drawing as a kind of token of sincerity and finally, after about 30 minutes, seemed unable to bear the boredom any longer and informed me she had finished her work and needed to leave.


She handed me her sketchbook, “I’m done, wanna see it?” She had created a credible outline of the leaf and, apparently overwhelmed by the complexity, did quick child-like scribbles within the boundaries. Scribbles are not awful, just not what was assigned.


The value of this example is not in ridicule, but rather my observance of the difficulty and resistance to slowing and truly seeing. The application extends broadly.


Carl Honore’s In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed convincingly speaks of the beauty of slowness in a variety of arenas including eating, work, medicine, and sex….citing a new hunger for slowing as a “message people want to hear.” He includes Frederick Nietzsche’s detection of a growing culture “of hurry, of indecent and perspiring haste, which wants to get everything done at once.”


Cecelia is a fractal—a reduced-sized copy--of the whole of her surrounding culture. She is bored with what is and she scribbles.


Deliberate slowing aborts the constant movement toward things that glisten for attention. I find it distinctly uncomfortable. It feels irresponsible to disobey time or the siren call to action.But I am seeing that when I concede to slowness, there is a direct correlation to increased awareness and interest in life as it is.....and less of my own scribbling.

sentinel eyes

“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.”
                                                                                                      ------ Pablo Picasso


“There is no other reason for drawing than the awareness of the eye awakening from its half-sleep. There is - I am convinced - no other good reason for art, all the art-popes and theories notwithstanding...”
                                                                                                          ------Frederick Franck

by david, age 5

I want to preface my affirming remarks about children and attentiveness with a disclaimer.

Armed with ample and credible personal experience I have maintained and often verbally proclaimed my cynicism about kids and those who tout their inherent loveliness and innocence. After a few short months they seem to adopt multiple behaviors that make them less than desirable dinner companions or fellow shoppers…certainly a hindrance to progress in the studio.


But with the weight (and the glory) of intimate years with small children behind me, it is easier now to see them in an unprejudiced light and to even learn from them something of what we easily abandon as we accumulate years. John Taylor says it skillfully---


Over the swinging parapet of my arm
Your sentinel eyes lean gazing, Hugely alert
In the pale unfinished clay of your infant face,
They drink light from this candle on the tree.
Drinking, not pondering, each bright thing you see,
You make it yours without analysis
And, stopping down the aperture of thought
To a fine pinhole, you are filled with flame….


In a life drawing class in Santa Fe earlier this month I was standing before a large blank page preparing to draw. Zeus, our model, was nude and in a prone position directly in front of me readied for a 30 minute pose. Barry Moser, our instructor, explained how he wanted us to approach the drawing: “Go ahead, be a voyeur for now. Take time to look at Zeus with care. Look at him as you would look at one you loved. Examine the folds, the curvatures, the light and shadow. Quiet the mind of distractions and simply gaze at him.”


Most of us do not default to this kind of seeing. It is weird. Quiet gazing is an anomaly to most of us over five. “Drinking” what is in front of us without naming, judging, or analyzing is something small children do well. Seeing well is a return to the child-gaze and alertness that energizes us as artists, as humans, “letting go of what we know to honor what exists.”(paraphrase of David Bazan’s lyrics).

the muscles of attentiveness

"How you love anything is how you love everything."
                                                                      --------Richard Rohr in The Naked Now

My original tweaking of this quote would be fitting: "How you show attention to anything is how you show attention to everything." Attentiveness, like love, is "one piece."  As I increasingly notice the unnoticeable, the ordinary, the mundane, I am developing muscles of attentiveness that spill over into the whole of life. We become the kinds of people who pay attention indiscriminately.

One of the assignments I have implemented in classes or workshops to develop these valuable muscles is asking students to draw the most boring subject in view. Don't go looking for a "good" subject, but find that "good" in what I am currently dismissing... to discover the intrinsic beauty in the least makes life a kind of adventure.

Fully developed (ing) attentiveness saves the artist from the trap of self-absorbtion since it has become, as Mr. Rohr describes, "one piece".  Our attention now includes the range of people and circumstances so integral to our lives. Practiced well, attentiveness gives to the world the same consideration it gives to the object of  its art.

momento mori

"The nearer she came to death, the more, by some perversity of nature, did she enjoy living." Ellen Glasgow

Recently, I was looking for a birthday present for my mid-twenties single son and happened on some well-designed t-shirts themed with skulls.  I enjoyed the artwork, but did not purchase one because the images turned me off. My dismissive thinking took the path of classifiying these as morbid and promoting some kind of evil.

 Momemto mori: "Remember, you will die" or " Remember your mortality" in one tradition is a genre of art that is specifically created to function as a helpful reminder of our impending death and, as Ellen Glasgow helps us see, will aid us in living fully.


I had a personal "momento mori" over the weekend watching the father of my two oldest daughters succumb to a ravaging cancer. All the distractions of the daily frenzy and duties ceased in attending to that final suffering and that final sigh. A clarity formed about what is worth my attention.


Absolute attention is something we seek as artists.  We want to be free of those external and internal encumbrances that speak of hurry, intimidation, self-exaltation and a host of other insidious killers of originality and works that speak.


The  "momento mori", then, is not darkness, but actually serves to  harness those truly dark entities that keep me from creating. It paradoxically puts it all in proper order.


Maybe I will get the t-shirt for myself.

the ferns on the forest floor

“We attend, waiting, for the veil of everyday habit to fall away so that what we paid no attention to, because it struck us as so ordinary, might be revealed as miraculous.”

----Czeslaw Milosz

I have not always been interested in paying attention. Most of my life I have been a driven person and have often declared if I died at 50 I would have accomplished as much as if I died at 100. Driving life fast  is akin to living a freeway sort of existence that bypasses all the interesting places and people on those two lane roads that often run parallel to the large interstates. About ten years ago I began to loosen my grip on finding my identity in this frenetic pursuit.  This recent Change began with some good books and, as Michelangelo stated when sculpting,  "another few days and life will break through."
But I am also following a thread of attentiveness drawn from memories that reside alive in me from decades ago.

The first five years of my life I lived in Juneau, Alaska. Our home was situated at the base of a mountain across from Gastineau Channel. My dad had built most of the house. He constructed the kitchen part of it over a creek that came down off the mountain. It flowed under our kitchen floor and we could access it with a trap door. The house was surrounded by dense forest and it served as a playground for my sister and me.

In our frequent visits to the forest, the ferns that thrived there were an attraction to me. I think the reason for this is the proximity I had as a three-year-old to things short and close to the ground. They had a smell, a look, and a presence that drew my attention and gave me delight. It is the first experience of noticing and attentiveness in my memory. Attention to those ferns was a beginning that, I think, whet my appetite for more.

regaining our sight

One of my students/friends from a recent drawing class came to my house last week to show me a seed pod she had found. She enthusiastically pointed out the curious shapes, contours, and textures she was finding in that irrelevant artifact.

The small becomes large. The inconsequential takes center stage.


I have wondered why this business of drawing transcends the mechanics and principles to something much larger. John Taylor talks about the "sense of beyondness at the heart of things." I wonder if we are, in our art, being drawn to a kind of mystery that is present in seeing with a sort of third eye that sees beauty in cracked plaster,folded laundry and homely insects.

lost in wonder

This Lost in Wonder is actually the title of a book by Esther DeWaal on redisovering attentiveness. Her book is one of those few that have affected the way I live.  In it she quotes May Sarton from Journal of a Solitude:


If one looks long enough at almost anything,
Looks with absolute attention at a flower,
a stone,
the bark of a tree,
grass, snow, a cloud,
something like revelation takes place.
Something is 'given',
and perhaps that something
is always a reality outside the self.

moving my stuff

Moving is never easy.  Stuff always gets in the way making progress difficult.  I am currently moving my stuff from a website on yahoo to this blogspot. This is going to be a slow process, so keep checking back.  marty

a new beginning

"Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending.".....Maria Robinson