As ever, stay hungry and curious.
BTW: Slow posting at Sketchbook 2018
N. A. Jones |
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I had to do something. From the bottom of my heart I know I have been neglecting my duties at this blog, but please forgive me for being ever so human (Meaning I am forgetful and frail.) I have been writing and knocking out the occasional essay. With encouragement over the last few months, I finally dug into researching for publication. I finished selecting about 10 to scour my writing and polish it perfect before submission. New writing is coming out of me as well. So between that, quilting, and life I had to let go of a few pressures in order to forge ahead. Reinvention is an acquired skill and flying is somehow intrinsic. As for the drawings, I'll be setting aside time through December to meet my promise from last year. I'm moving onto larger paper as old theme are requiring more room to render. What I have run into is a penchant for underground art again and hints of street theatre hang in the air and on the radio. What I hear may connect in what I draw if I let it happen whether my skills are there or not. Something is fomenting in my gut about this. I do not want to let it simmer for a few years before I do anything about it. It is a grumble in the tummy for now. I know I'll need to set aside time and I need to by more paper as of months ago. A ream from Office max may need do along with little notes and little boxes and little stick men. Even calligraphy paired two dimensional figures may work. Meanwhile I'll play. Seems like I'll be an artist whether or not I reach gallery fame or museum establishment. This is shit is addictive. BTW: I found a biography on Bansky from 1/2 price books. Forgive me again as I have yet to break the spine in any direction. I'll get there, I hope.
As ever, stay hungry and curious. BTW: Slow posting at Sketchbook 2018 The past few weeks have been packed with household repairs, quilting, researching, and working a manuscript. I also decided to return to weight training considering how much I use my arms and legs between art, cooking, and quilting. The strength is there, now to maintain it and work on nimble agile fingers. As for two dimensional work, I thought I was on hiatus until muse struck last night to return to old sketchbook themes and work them up. This time around I can say I have let being shy go and I am starting to go for the jugular on themes that may slip more close to Dali's sense of knowing. Meanwhile I am actually expecting more of this to come. Tales of the street tend to echo on to other blocks. One can't help but to process it through art.
As ever, stay hungry and curious. Hubris #2 July 2018
The neighbor said that my biggest fix in resolving this journey through ancestry, gardening, and painting is a presumption that everything is eternal. Musing in the lows of the words, he reminded me everything dies. A three year old rose in my throat. I started to fume. I bitched. I moaned. In the slow realization, I held back the tears. Funny how I go into severe psychosis when my hands prove otherwise to my neighbor's joking and family advising. My hands in the garden, tend to the long stretch of summer. Come autumn I can let some things seek shelter in the refuge of the house. Still, that is not everything in pots or the dirt. I also argue against my neighbor's instruction by refusing to be wrong by not touting the plant's long winter's sleep. Damn you! Everything does not die! Damn you to hell! Yeah! Yeah! Next time I will bring the cookies. Secretly I can whisper in guilt that every autumn it is the same grief. I continue to water despite the growing patches of brown on every leaf. Even after being ever confident the green will return in a few days, my psyche cracks when the first frost claims every late blooming flower and frond. Late summer watering comes with a process of surprises that I commit to every year. Come every blistering day of heat in August, I ignore the call of death and dehydration. Nothing dies, you hear me! Nothing dies. I refuse to become banal and gloss over the death of the summer bounty. I grieve in confusion especially when I stand at the foot of the kale and collard plants mother planted over four years ago. They come back every year. Why should I not presume the rest will as well. My eternal is the mint bushes as well. Still they need more room to grow. Their roots crowd the growing stems to the edge of the planters. As for that lesson I relate that family eventually leaves to start over. We get pushed out of the nest by our past. I wonder how many memories does a house hold before an Amityville Horror like expulsion rejects every human? How many years then until the heart of the house dies? Again, my problem, why can I not consider the house eternal? In the least, why does the garden not survive me physically? I may be arguing from the wrong angle. The only ideas that sit at my head are human soul is eternal and I still mourn my grandmother. Considering that, why is not the artifact and efforts of my experience eternal as well? Right now, I do not see the point of looking death straight on. I can not bear a viewing. I can live in metaphors, dreams, and images. I can grieve quietly in my vehicle after watching my symbolic attachments parade the avenue as if they knew anything of me. As for Hubris and mourning, it reflects all my pomposity and most of my expectations of death. If I live in symbols, running away from a natural end is averted. Maybe the real problem to acknowledging mortality is that I just can not seem to grasp change over time. For eternal to be ever mine, maybe I found a way home. Maybe they dammed the river upstream and I can cross in the same place twice. What happened to yesterday, today, and tomorrow? Can't give me an answer can you? Everything is eternal - so there. As for the garden and the gouache paintings, I faithfully watered and pruned for that many years to become desperate enough to see my work move someone, something, somewhere. Pride turned conceit tells me that maybe I need to let go of attachments. If I did, then it all would be for nothing. Releasing all coveted memory would result in forgetting why I took brush and paint to paper the month she died. The point of art maybe to sell, but where I am is no less far from maintaining sanity. The like are those pieces that survived Van Gogh. My eternity in Hubris is no less than Ars gratia artis and beauty born of strife. No matter if they reside in the trash dump or the safe of a museum, I can not give up. I am harbored and healed by these misconception s of mortality. One day my ignorance may cripple me. To be coddled then, until then. About four in the afternoon I went to water the foundation. Afterwards, I could not help but harvest carrots, Chinese cabbage, and celery seed as well. The seed was the only disappointment. Spiders wove well around each seed cluster. I did not need to mix its efforts with my desires for home grown seasonings. If I had, surely it would be a problem for the doctor to solve. As for the carrots, they might be my eternal as well. I cut the tops off outside because of ants in the foliage. Memory nudged me to root them in water before taking the carrots inside for cooking. Flashbacks of Gram's apartment window with cut carrot tops and sweet potato slips nesting in water are beginning to etch in a transparent layer over my eyes. Plants change rooms. Plants change people. Plants change passages. Funny how in my memory I am expecting the plants in her window to grow. Over five years have passed since I was there. I just looked in my mind's eye. The sweet potato slip is cascading over the air conditioning unit. The carrot tops are crowding the mouth of the Mason jar. My eternal may be about following shapes in memory. Architecture first, Color the mood second. I refuse my practice to be a misconception of mortality. Argued from the side of the living, maybe. Yet, those with eyes to see have the occasion to peer the immortal. No doubt, as I have time, it is all I the brush for me, at least for now. No coddling this time, resolve definite. ~As ever, stay hungry and curious. We all know who the hardest critic is when it comes to viewing the work. It is the eyes, the gut, and the pivot turn that tears into the rug which makes that critic archetype inherent in every artist. I can not say that I am any different. Though I wonder if it is all a matter of selfishness that motivates tearing that hole in the rug any wider versus being attentive to what the art object has become.
If you could not guess, my conundrum is over continuing the Hubris series. I spent the last three years photographing vegetables, weeds, and herbs. I also spent time out in the heat drawing petals and noting insects in the crevices of my sketch book. Let us just say that I am invested in the process whether or not I can render notes in the July heat for another year or not. Today, I sat outside ruminating over how I had not spent time in the garden since the cool of April. I buried my chin in my chest to steady my emotional berating and thought of the “me”, who boasts of our minor green pathway on and off the computer. Then I remembered gratitude for faithful watering and pruning several times a week. I do work in the garden, just not the way I thought need count. Now there is talk that there will be no garden next year. Why? For several years we have not had a yield to feed substantially. Not to forget the garden pests. Every so many days they decimate a plant by eating leaves, fruit, flower, and stems. They leave nothing to grow. Most of the time, instead of pulling the plant, we wait until the plant recovers. I said I'd render in my book come the cycle of rains and dehydration. Now I need best myself by drawing the damage. Will I have enough energy by a late sun's hour? I do not know. I just do not want to give up. The living green aids my mind as well as fascination. I can not give up. Then there is my lemon balm. I grew it in a pot for a year. This year I transplanted it into the ground along with young parsley shoots. The parsley took. The balm is shriveling and drying up like an old woman. Crone has its lessons. This year the plant took on blossoms even as it was drying. I was wondering about fruit. I am still hoping for recovery and herbal blended tea over ice. I may be out of luck and I am frustrated dear over it. I am frustrated almost to tears. The whole matter is not that things die. This matter is that I am doing the best I can to nurture and water the plant and it is still withering away. I am having flash backs to caring for my ailing grandfather when I was a teenager. I held on to self-imposed blame for years thinking if only I had done ____, he would still be alive. From that trigger, I can say with confidence that this is a breakthrough in the work. This is an excellent sign of what I was hoping to accomplish with Hubris initially. It is the whole premise of exploring mourning through the garden to use as a source of impetus for the paintings. This is the work that goes on behind the gouache and brush on paper that calls out color and line intricate and divine. I still have notes to write in a garden journal. They are all mile markers in healing. Right now I may be quilting, but I still day dreaming about painting. I daydream until I hit that memory of taking two years off from painting. Though I best be about getting my thoughts in order if I push toward script in the body of the painting, an element of retablo if you will. For one thing, the “Blackbird” series will need words in the collage or quilting end of it all. Continuity for me may perhaps exist after all. As ever, stay hungry and curious. |
N.A. JonesPicking up where I left off. Archives
November 2019
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