URGENT!

I cannot wait to write this blog. I have been given a gift! How many times has it happened that one is given the thread to tie all the loose ends of one's life together and see how it all fits? That, in a nutshell is what I have been given. Last night a fabulous 90 minute show aired on Sundance Channel. It was titled "Who Gets To Say It's Art". It was a show primarily about Henry Geltzahler, the curator for The Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC, who in 1969 mounted a show at the Met called "New York Painting 1940-1970". As it told about Henry Geltzahler's career as a curator and art critic/historian, it told the story of how American artists of the post war era struggled to find an identity through abstract expressionism by way of Jackson Pollack and William DeKooning, into the new order of pop art of Jasper Johns, Roy Liechtenstein, Larry Rivers, and Andy Warhol. What a story! It connected the post war art underground to the beatniks of mid-century intellectualism, and on to the 60's pop art culture from which sprang Dylan, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, hippies, and the end of art in the punk rock world of anarchy. What it has to do with me, is that I was an art student at precisely this time, from 1960-1964, the stretch point of an incredible phase in the history of the current culture. While I could draw fairly well, I couldn't fathom how one could make a living from hanging paintings in a gallery for sale when no one gave a rats ass about art or what value anything had in a suburban society that cared only about gadgets, cars, and electrical appliances. In short, a culture devoid of culture. It was a discouraging predicament. As I withdrew from the conveyor belt of university life to pursue a life of vagabond hedonism, I embraced drinking and drug use partly because it was an accepted behavior among the artist community. All at once, habits of dubious merit became the dominant feature in my life. Of course, I will admit that there are other substantial reasons that might explain the whys of my substance abuse, but let's leave that one for another blog. For now, this one fits the story. With the outward appearance of an artist, but lacking the working end of it, I bounced through a series of events that landed me at the doorstep of rock and roll. I joined a rock and roll band as an extension of art, a different format of an emerging cultural expression that propelled the individual into the center of the painting as the artist and the subject of the painting. I might call it an existential slight of hand; posing both the painter and the painting simultaneously. Ah, but I feel like a poseur even saying it. Even so, that is how I saw it. The band that I had the good fortune of joining was the MC5, as you might know. While we figured into the political upheaval of the late 60's, it was not the launching point of the band. As young ruffians and provocateurs of the day, we were interested in enlightening our audiences to the possibilities beyond the mundane suburban drift that everyone was annoyed with. It all fit so well at the time, and unlike art it was accessed by millions. But that is a longer story and gets too complicated for todays purposes.

What I wish to say here is that having made the connection with how art seeped its way into pop culture, and consequently into the way the decades have played out in terms of my life, I have gained the tools to pull it back together at the point where it makes sense to me personally. I now know what I want to do. I see the work of Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky as the bridges between the older European forms that moved painting from the breakthroughs of Cezanne, Matisse, and Picasso into the new order of spiritual introspection that leads to the door of those New York painters.

This is but one thread in a great story of art. Many threads exist in a fabric that runs through our time, through all time. It's funny, the older I get, the more curious I am about how everything is woven together in our history, the history of all mankind. Being a part of it is such a happy thing. We are blessed to have this world as our canvas. We can create whatever we like to decorate it and express our joy at being here. If this is a new years resolution of sorts, then I will say that I resolve to create as much art as I can in the coming year. I will try to find my connection to this world through art, it's what I was meant to do.

One more thing: While I'm thinking of it, I wish to thank Steven Streight, one of followers of this blog, who has so generously and thoughtfully put the Music Is Revolution badge up on his blog. You can link to Steven's blog instantly by clicking on his icon at the top of this page. Thank you Steven, and thank you for your comments and views. We have a great deal in common, I can see that. I wish you all the very best in all your efforts. Right on, my brother, and Happy New Year!

A Sure Sign Of Spring!

I looked out my window today and saw a curious sight. Across the street in the play area of the Christian school a flock of about 20 to 30 birds were flittering about in the grass, landing, taking off again, doing what birds do in their bird world. The snow had melted away from the week long coverage, and a wet ground was finally visible. I looked at what appeared to be an orange color on the fronts of these small creatures with some dismay. Wow, these guys are robin red breasts! What in the world are they doing here in Eugene, Oregon? It was always my belief that robins migrated to warmer climates in the winter and returned to the buds of Michigan springtime. Here in Eugene, and now, a day before the Winter Solstice, a small group of Robins are playing outside my window in my yard. How can this be? Not able to answer that question, I could only feel the tugging of my memory of living in Detroit and being alerted by the annual prevailing robins that spring was just around the corner. How can that be? We have only just begun to stiffen to the winds and rain, and in the recent week, a formidable snow storm that paralyzed the area for several days. I thought of my brethren in Detroit, remembering now the harshest winters that seemed to last for eternity, plodding against slush and bulk snow through all manner of inconvenient weather. The dark skies and bitter cold air, stinging fingertips and frostbitten ears, going to necessary appointments through the massive traffic chaos that somehow Detroiters take for granted as territorial characteristics. Another winter, another half year of trudging through Hell. So what, a Detroiter might say, it's something we all have in common.
This past week or two, the nation has been exposed to the people of Detroit in desperate need at the feet of our nation's administrators. They are begging for assistance in a crises for survival. They show footage of ordinary people installing parts and systems into assemblies of vehicles. They imply that these ordinary people are somehow aiding in the corrupt practices of their employers to defraud other people by making inferior automobiles. But my heart goes out to these ordinary people who await to first robins of spring to relieve them from their five months of torment called the Michigan winter. And now, in addition to winter, the harshest of realities, that they will no longer have an income. My dad was a Ford Motor Company employee. He worked there for 40 years, and supported his family while his employer made and developed the styles that made our country proud. There were ridiculous creations during periods of dubious inspiration it's true. Yet, beyond the many head shaking designs and outlandish power quests, a fierce national pride came with the territory. Across the planet, people in every country admired American initiative and style. The American automobile, scoffed at by some, ridiculed by many, but the absolute all-out apple of everyones eye when it comes to the individual statement. It is what is symbolic of what our nation is all about, the uniqueness of the individual.
Let us be objective when judging our fellow individuals. The people who assemble Detroit's products are trained to perform a specific task. It is tedious and repetitive. It requires focus and attention, and it requires an appreciation for doing correct application in a multiple task process that culminates in a worthy product. I don't by any stretch of my imagination deem what these people create as inferior. It is what it is, and for the most part, it has created a national identity for this country, not to mention the building of tanks and aircraft that got us through the second world war. Let's give some points to our brethren in Detroit who have endured decades of suffering from drug culture and urban decay that has left the city in a dilapidated state. On a visit a couple of years ago, I was reminded of how the people of Detroit possess a quality of soulfulness that makes them some of the warmest, down to earth people one can ever meet. There is a charm about Detroit that is so remarkable that one is amazed that such humility can exist in such an environment. They are part of our people, people,....an important part.

I don't have an opinion about the bailout. The problem that caused this consequence is much bigger than Detroit or the auto industry. I do know that many people are in desperate shape. I do know that more people than those who live and work in Detroit are facing unimaginable alternatives. As a nation we must take care of our family. And all honest, hardworking people deserve a robin or two to remind them that spring is just around the corner.

ART NEWS

So, todays subject is art. What qualifies something as art? Well, I'm not sure. Do you recognize art at first glance? Is it immediately a different breed from say, craft or design, or even scribbling? Does art always make a universal statement about the world, people, philosophy, god? An exhibit at Wayne State University (my alma mater) some many years ago titled "Anything Is Art", seemed to qualify art as anything one cared to examine. Thereby assuming that the entire universe as well as everything in it, was art, if you chose to see it as such. Ironically, the MC5 was represented in the exhibit as something quaintly significant in this regard. The primitive 8mm film by Leni Sinclair, showing a collage of footage of the band during performances, and with an accompanying soundtrack of the song "Kick Out The Jams", also the title of the film, was screened to the gallery as a performance, and received with an exhilarating ovation. So then, does that qualify it as art? Is the art the band, the film, the event, or the event in which it is being seen? Hell if I know. Maybe the real question is how to recognize art from sham. I'm sure that both art and sham come very close to overlapping into each others territory from time to time. That by being accepted, anything has an equal chance of prevailing.

I have been trying these last months to reinvent my career as an artist. My paintings are oil portraits of some of my friends from the music profession who bring a sense of "Christ-ness" to the stage. As if Christ were the ultimate performer, inspiring all sorts of ecstasy, revelation, horror, and predicament to all. That in any other time and place, might well put them on trial and be executed for their audacity, for their power to influence, for their lack of restraint, for being emboldened, for creating disorder, for being a danger to society, for their beauty. I paint their likenesses because I like their faces. As the artist, I decide how to represent them as I see them. So, in that way, what I do is my art. How to distinguish that from 22,000 other paintings on eBay that claim to be art, I do not know. For me, it is all a learning process. I don't suppose that it ever becomes a routine mechanical method. There is always something there that you didn't see the first time through. But each attempt to define your vision is a step closer to reaching the goal of being what you see. Maybe it's not a whole lot different from music.