“Loving you is Red” & “And it was all Yellow”

4.3.25 – 5.7.25

In the winter hangover of March it was red; deep, blood, fingernail, hot fire red. Then in the storms of April it shifted to yellow: golden sun, first flowers, long twilights through the western trees. I didn’t know, as a potter, that color could be a daily joy, or that my impulse to make could twin with an internal, mystical sense of what color was the color of the Now. Art as Higher Power; color as comms channel.

I’m wondering if maybe some of these paintings could be done way sooner than I think they could be done. Like just arbitrarily stopping. Seems like a good way to test that is to take one or two out of a batch early on — say after the second or third pass — and set it aside for a while; perhaps even hide it from myself. (I’m noticing that I keep starting paintings in groups or batches, just like pots. And iterating through them, just like pots: way more common to put some red or black on a half dozen in sequence, during a session, than to just work on one or two.)

I know there’s progression or development — that I’m “getting better” — because the older batches that kind of ran aground or got mothballed to the back of the now many, many piles of stretchers, leaned up against the walls like decks of giant cards ready to be shuffled… because when I dig to the back of those piles (sometimes finding entire paintings I’d forgotten about already), I often immediately see changes / improvements I can make, which I hadn’t seen previously.

Also noticing my tendency to work fairly small — sections of color bunched up closely to one another; a hesitation or reluctance to spread out and have less on each canvas.

I don’t know why I’m not painting the things that happen spontaneously when I draw; seems to be a big difference between what ‘wants to happen’ with a pen or pencil than with a brush. I’m rarely sketching anything on the canvas — a recent new batch, I blocked out a couple big areas in grey first thing, and that seems nice now, with several layers and more detail added, but actually sketching in a plan feels like cheating (not the system; my Self and/or my HP), in much the same way that I feel very hostile to the idea of looking at photos for reference; or really looking at anything out in the world while adding paint — all the ideas, shapes, and colors are coming from that mysterious system of signals within.

Very strange, perhaps. A strange, strage game.

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Then, after writing that, with the following batch of acrylics I intentionally sketched in some charcoal, from one of my pen & ink drawings, and it went so well I tried it again with oils, and that worked so well that I might be drifting into a new method.

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Like a photograph stealing part of your soul, wording about painting seems dangerous. Even ghoulish. So a blog, ostensibly, about it is perhaps a risky delve into the caverns of the undead. Or an empty canvas, waiting to be filled in with life.

Or neither. Or both,

or

… standing in the office kitchen nook/closet, spit-scrubbing this morning’s paint off my hands and forearms while the coffee maker slowly chugs. Trading too much sleep for paint time lately and it catches up with me. the painting dreams are better, or at least more enjoyable.

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Or like, let’s say, a 117-year-old concrete bridge which spans an active freight train line; after two decades of daily crossings some signs and concrete barricades appeared and we suddenly had to go the long way ‘round, every damn time. Then, after a season or two, the barricades are mysteriously moved aside (heavy equipment required!) and the way is clear again, allowing the old, deep knowledge of every groove and bend in the gravel mile leading from the bridge to home (and back again) to once again be accessible and revealed; I had forgotten, as I so often do, that I remember patterns like this, and that they’re still in there, somewhere, even when I can’t purposefully recall them. The signs: BRIDGE CLOSED: like so much of civilization, loudly proclaiming (in black & yellow & a serious font) that this is still not possible, and likely illegal, and probably risky-verging-on-catastrophic as I roll past. I’ve gotten pretty good at both seeing and ignoring the warning signs.

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I had a dream about the perfect bottle of glue — strong like super glue, but without clogging up or needing special handling, nicely sized and shaped bottle, clear and good flow to the glue. Then, as best I can tell, I forgot it was a dream and transposed it as a memory, to where I actually went looking for it in the Outside studio the other day. Flummoxed, then I thought it must be over in the Inside studio; that dichotomy or two-ness of the physical spaces probably standing in for the containers in my mind of Dream memory and Actual memory. (Or ‘remembering Self’ and ‘experiencing Self’; or Thought & Memory; or Hugin and Munnin; or Order & Chaos; or surface and form; or Me vs. Others; or whatever, some of all of those, none of them.

I gradually realized it was a dream memory because the bottle didn’t have a label — it was clear and the glue was fully visible, like the honey bottle in the shape of a bear. Reminds me a little of Lance Lestcher’s The Perfect Machine, or of a perfectly centered cone of clay, or a day that starts misty and 55º and ends up sunny at 72º.

The perfect thing; “It has to be Perf-ect.”

And it was all yellow.

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