Brown/blue monotype

Late clouds

Watermelon/black monotype

32x40” lightfast marker on paper

Orange monotype

6x8” oil pastel

6x8” oil pastel

32x40” oil/graphite on paper

32x40” oil/graphite on paper

32x40” oil pastel/gouache on paper (bad lighting)

If you're in the neighborhood, stop over to 120 Gray Ave this Friday

28x40” experiment: graphite/oils on paper

Payne’s grey

Green string theory

Blue monotype

Sepia monotype

Grayscale monotype

Blue monotype

Autumn Colors

Sunset/Telephone pole

22x30” monotype/avocado yellow

22x30” monotype/purple

22x30” monotype/green

Purple/Gray

Short story

Today I woke up early, and just reading/no beer the night before, was all ready for a great day of sales. I was especially fired because at the close of last night, after the Sun had gone down, a young couple wondered in. I ended up selling a big piece that had been sitting most the summer. They’re all my babies, so when one piece of art doesn’t sell, I wonder what’s wrong with my baby. It’s really nice when one that hadn’t found a home, finds one.

Because I made the sale I fell asleep deciding to buy a power sander to bust out more pieces, quicker. Of course it’s always fun when you know what you need to purchase and have a lot of choices, and Gee, what power tool are you going to end up with? There was a sale at Ace Hardware so the choice was a no-brainer, and all stoked, I go back to Studio De Herrera at 120 Gray Avenue, Santa Barbara. I put my $10 Art sign up against the chain-link fence, put out all the pieces that hadn’t sold and were still available, and get to work. A double espresso and a hit of sativa and I’m good. I finish the silvery piece pictured (though not sure it’s finished) and start figuring out what I’m going to do next.

It’s warm, but in the shade down by the beach it’s not too bad. I walk out to the street to take a look, see if there is anyone I can call to, to get them to come in and take a look. Kind of dead, I turn to go back to work, and looking east see the clouds have become a 2,500 foot wall—top to bottom—of light gray, over Montecito. I look straight up to see which way the clouds above me are moving and sure enough that big gray wall is headed to the Funk Zone. I begin putting art under the overhang, and as I’m going about this, I look east again, and decide to pick up the pace. Now I’m trotting back and forth getting and gathering up smaller pieces on the quick, getting them under cover.

The first drops I heard were like feathered bursts of a machine gun. It reminded me of drops the size I had experienced once in the American southwest, drops the size of quarters. But as they hit, I carried the last baby to safety. I had successfully gotten everything under the overhang and began positioning my chair to take in the downpour in all its glory. Suddenly a strong gust of wind, another, and all hell breaks loose. Now I’m scrambling to save what is most important as a torrential downpour goes angular—like a fool I had envisioned water falling vertically. The sound of heavy things falling and banging on other heavy things makes itself known out across the immediate neighborhood. I abandoned saving art—even the monotypes—the biggest sellers—and grab my MacBook as lighting strikes less than a football field away. I turn to run to the open door of Boathouse Crossfit, a brick building, and in my periphery I see the ten by twenty foot tenting for the beer-peddle cart—a thing groups of people do where they drink beer and peddle a big cart around downtown—lift straight up twenty feet, roll, and turn into huge six-pointed mobile impaling device.

Between my space and Boathouse Crossfit is the Segway space, where they train people with little orange cones before tours, and as I’m traversing that space, their fluorescent sign blows up with a Frankenstein sound and sparks, as a transformer down the street blows up—or was it another strike of lightning—I’m not sure. Recoiling, in passive body language, anticipating the next loud bang to be the back of my head, I turn to see the parking lot of 120 Gray as a giant gyre of debris whipped in a circle of gray and white water. At that moment I thought, this is it, lights out buddy.

It’s not often you run for your life, but I did today.

Later, as things cleared and everyone was checking all the damage I called to a somewhat full street, “Hey, I got art—half price!” It got a good laugh. Cleaning up, there was my new power tool, used once, soaked.

Silvery one

Poem for 9/1

Today is September 1st and here is Auden's poem. He wrote it upon discovering that war had broken out in Europe again, and goes into all the madness that is human life, and at the end, says—We must love each other or die, and even though we're all beleaguered in one way or another, there are those of us who are points of light, still fighting for truth and justice, and I want to be an affirmation of that…. A dated poem, but a great one.

September 1, 1939

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offense
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analyzed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

—W.H. Auden

B/W

Prototype piece

New materials/ tech: birch board, latex, pastel, car paint

Ten dollars all day

Novel Excerpt:

   It should be pointed out that the popular conception of Indians, or Native Americans, is of nomadic peoples who lived in tee-pees and followed Buffalo around. Once you moved off the plains, up and over the Great Divide, you reached the high desert of the northern hemisphere’s south west. The pueblo natives were not nomadic, but built rock apartments and lived in the same place year-round. The culture spread throughout the area and fostered many hybrid tribes but it was always acknowledged that the Hopi were there first, and that everyone had learned how to build apartments and plant crops from them. You might be thinking, “But wait, what about the Anasazi? Weren’t they there first?” And there’s an answer for that, but hold the thought.

     Things started for the Hopi when they found the three giant mesas they were instructed to find and began living as they were taught to live. They were told that after awhile some other people would show up, and they did. They called themselves Navajo. To make peace the Hopi gave up some of their land. The Navajos were nasty compared to the Hopi, prone to war and all, but the two tribes lived somewhat stably for hundreds and hundreds of years until the 1500s. Then soldiers, priests, and settlers began invading the pueblo lands where about forty thousand people lived. They were killed and enslaved by the hundreds and fear of whites was deeply instilled. Priests were assigned to create mini-theocracies where the people were forced to provide labor for food and materials. Check points were established along rivers and access to farmland was restricted. Especially hurtful was the assault on traditional pueblo teachings. The priests outlawed their religion and seized and burned the religious masks of their Kachina gods that they used in ceremonies.

    “It came to a head in the late 1600s when about fifty pueblo elders were arrested and accused of sorcery. Four were sentenced to death—three hung, the fourth committing suicide—and the remaining men were whipped and in-prisoned. When news reached the outer pueblos they assembled and headed to Santa Fe to free them. After a siege and negotiations the pueblo people won their release. Among those freed was an elder named Popé, he took up residence at Taos pueblo and for the next five years he and his two lieutenants Alonso and Domingo traveled from pueblo to pueblo advocating a return to the way of the Hopi. The people were asked to cleanse themselves in ritual baths, to use their pueblo names, revolt, and destroy all the things of the whites—to basically do what the whites were doing to them. All the pueblos, including the Hopi, joined in the plan. Popé promised that once the colonists were expelled the Kachina gods would return and reward them.

    On the designated morning the Taos pueblo sent out runners to all the other pueblos. The runners carried with them pieces of string, each with a set number of knots tied in them. The elders of each pueblo were to untie each knot each morning, the morning of the final knot being the day for that pueblo to rise up, kill all soldiers and priests, then advance on Santa Fe for the final route.

    The plan worked, the invaders were killed and their settlements destroyed. But a drought continued and raids by Navajo and Apache increased. The ancient gods did not return and what Popé had promised did not happen. Soon, in the early 1700s, a really large group of soldiers and priests again marched into the land of the pueblos. They marched to Santa Fe unopposed, promising the people clemency and protection along the way, if they would swear allegiance to whites and their religion. In the following months the other pueblos accepted their terms. Though the agreement was bloodless, rule became increasingly severe and the pueblo people were again provoked to revolt. And again it was over their ancient teachings. Most pueblo people were happy to go along with the silly routines of the whites, but when they cut feet and hands off of those practicing seasonal rituals, that was too much. A dozen or so pueblos attempted another organized revolt, launched with the killing of five priests. Retribution was unmerciful, prolonged, thorough, and by the end of the century the last resisting pueblo had surrendered to the whites completely. With the 1800s came the federal government of the United States, and more decades of bloodshed. By the second half of that century, due to acts by the US Congress, the Hopi lost three-quarters of what was originally marked out to them. All the things that had happened to them, going back to when the Navajo showed up and started harassing them, their teachings had prophesied would happen. Finally, in the early 1900s, the entire Hopi tribe, from all three mesas, split between the traditionalists who wanted to follow their ancient religion and those who wanted to follow the whites. The Hopi being the Hopi decided to settle the conflict with a tug of war. The traditionalists lost. They picked up and headed west about ten miles to start a new dwelling, one founded on and dedicated to the teachings and instructions originally given to them.

    By the time chain smoking ethnologist Stonefield got to the mesas to get to work on his book, about fifty years after the tug of war and tribal split, it turned out to be difficult to determine what was what when it came to the truth of Hopi teaching and prophesy. Much of what had been predicted had already taken place, leaving the whole of their instructions in a kind of limbo, up in the air.

Hopi Kachina circa late 1950s - $225

Late piece

Restocking a popular one

Underground Mueseum, Los Angeles

Novel Excerpt

    Oddly enough, or maybe not, this part of the story begins in New York City, in the early 1960s, in a high rise boardroom, blinded with morning sunlight. At the head of a table stood a tall philanthropist clothed in late fashion brought back from her recent trip to Europe. Around the table were lawyer types, and in the corner on a couch, was a lanky, chain-smoking, ethnologist. Of course a philanthropist is someone who donates funds to causes, and an ethnologist is someone who studies cosmologies—or what a people believes about themselves and where they came from—their origins. For instance, the Judeo-Christian-Muslim cosmology is about a god who created the Sun and Earth, a garden, and humans.

    The ethnologist is sitting there, looking down on the East River, listening to the American philanthropist explain her fascination and love for Native American culture—the indians as they called natives back then—and she’s concerned that the culture of the pueblo tribes—those that dwelled near the Four Corners area—where Utah/Colorado/New Mexico/Arizona meet—would be lost unless she paid someone to go out there, live with them, and record it all.

    The ethnologist sitting on the couch was Phillip Stonefield, he took the job offered by the philanthropist’s foundation, goes out to the oldest rock apartments known, atop three giant mesas in the center of the American south west, and tries to get in with the tribe. The name of the tribe is the Hopi, and all the other tribes acknowledge that the Hopi were there first, supposedly descended from an even earlier tribe which had broken up and disappeared south.

   The Hopi mesas look like massive stone tabletops rising a thousand feet above the vast desert floor, and then on top of them, are the rock apartments. The ethnologist gets there and rents a little rock room from a Hopi who had married an Irish wife, and who rent the room to passers-by. Stonefield ends up living with the Hopi for three years with ups and downs, where he achieved access to the inner circle of elders, and then lost it, and then regained it. So he barely gets the book because of a lot of argument within the Hopi tribe, based on what had happened to them in the past.

    The Hopi had been there for thousands of years, and when the Navajo came along, the Hopi gave up some of their land to maintain peace. In fact that’s what their name means—People of Peace. The Hopi and Navajo co-existed for awhile and then the Spanish and missionaries showed up. Shortly thereafter came a moment in the history of the Hopi where tribe members from two of the mesas went and killed members on the other mesa because they had started working with the missionaries. The missionaries were trying to destroy the Hopi teachings and prophecies.

Wild visitor

Summer Notes

A couple from Orange County came in and got a bigger piece today. The world of sales and the world of art are two different and strange worlds, and when you combine them, they make for an even bigger and stranger world. The husband is a photographer who asked to take some shots. This summer isn't turing out like I had it planned, but I'm still just as stoked. I hope it gets big at Malibu this week!

Monotype/new tech

Late Color Field

Late Poem

Venus of Urbino

Look at her,
fully naked head to toe,
her hand unaffectedly
covering the confluence of line
between the alpha and the omega—
looking at you with the most lovely gaze—
a heated certitude
you and her
are about to embrace
and crack the universe.

But 1538 is so very long ago,
and you’d take any woman
half as beautiful with soul deep as
those eyes. Such a look—
another artist’s reassurance that eternity,
however violent and cold,
shall retain heat;
and that in the end,
even we humans shall find our place—
we shall secure it at last
amongst all the time-swept gods
who have ever been.

Bigger

Going bigger

Bigger

Late commissions

New tech

Novel Excerpt

“Not every soul is tortured, you know.”

“Why? Why are some tortured and some not?”

“Well, why do you think?”

“Because they did something bad?”

“Yeah. And how else?”

“How else what?”

“How else does a soul end up tortured?”

“Romance? Like when lovers over a break-up. Or divorce?”

“Yeah. How else?”

“When someone important dies—like if a leader dies, that can torture souls.”

“Yeah.”

“And that’s it right? Love and death.”

“Nope, one more.”

“What?”

“Truth.”

“Of course, when the truth becomes the torture. But that’s what denial’s for.”

“Right, you either downshift into denial or carry on as a tortured soul.”

“Maybe the question then becomes, how tortured?”

“A lot of famous philosophers say the torture we endure is created in our own head; that there’s a chatter-box to consciousness, saying things and throwing out questions, that get us worried about stuff that may or may not be true.”

“Right.”

“And a lot of the times, even if it is true, we have no control over it anyway.”

“How do you separate that, though? How do you separate the positive thoughts from the bogus thoughts?”

“A lot of people swear by meditation.”

“Yeah.

“Have you ever tried it?”

“No.”

“Have you?”

“No, but I will one day. I keep telling myself I should.”

“How do you do it anyway?”

“You just find a quiet place, get comfortable, and focus on your breath. You focus so single-mindedly that you can’t hear the chatter-box anymore. Or barely hear it, at least. They say it takes practice, but the way into it is to just focus on your breath.”