Moonblog 2019
This isn't really about the moon, I call it a moonblog because a new homepage image appears twice a month on the new and full moon. The home page shows a featured image —sometimes freshly minted, sometimes seasonal, sometimes from years past— along with improvised ruminations, something like a leisurely blog. Some while ago I started adding short musical compositions to each moon entry, music is a second calling I've been working on - mostly in secret - for years. Previous years’ entries are here for your perusal; see the links, below.
The sharp-eyed visitor will notice that the year 2020 is entirely missing. I'll let you guess possible reasons for that. Also, 2023 seemed to dribble off into the sunset in late March. I can honestly blame Covid and a general sense of losing track. This year is already off to a slow start. Let's see if this one will fill out as the moons go by. Meanwhile, just to flesh things out for 2024 and make it worth your time, I'm re-posting some earlier things. Dated as shown. If you're looking for music entries, see years 2021 - 2023. I'll be adding more to 2024 all in good time.
Limicolous
I would like to claim that this is a large work measuring six by nine feet, executed on sheets of steel. Well, it could be! It's actually three close-up images of an old, well-used cookie sheet that I happened to notice earlier today when I was making a cup of tea. (Should I be telling you this? Does it spoil the illusion?) I have an interest in things that “do themselves”, they arise without affect or contrivance. It's difficult to do this in painting or any art form: we always have something up our sleeve. Maybe it's money, maybe it's a drive to be seen as brilliant. Whatever the reason, these hidden agendas have a way of sabotaging the whole endeavor of art. I'm pretty sure this cookie sheet doesn't care about much. But here it is effortlessnessly emanating beauty and mystery.
New Moon ~ April 5th, 2019
1937 Buick Automobile
This is a painting of a 1937 Buick Century Coupe. Driving one of these around town would have been a fine way to show off in the midst of a depression. At the time, a new Century Coupe went for $1,524, a tidy sum in those days. According to the CNN Money page, “General Motors was among the first automakers to put real emphasis on design in creating its new cars. An example is the Buick Century which was also one of the first examples of what would later be called a "muscle car." It was one of Buick's smallest cars but it had the biggest available engine, a 130 horsepower 8-cylinder that helped give the car a 100 mile per hour top speed.” It is still a handsome car. One of these today can fetch $75,000, probably a lot more than this painting will ever sell for.
New Moon ~ February 4th, 2019
Outlier, detail
This is a photo of a canvas in process, taken from an oblique angle. The charcoal drawing of an eye is the beginning of a triptych –later abandoned– of an early Wonder Woman comic book frame. The canvas background colors are from a much earlier –also abandoned– painting of a green ocean wave. I started that one some time in the late 1980s. Both of these paintings are in a category I think of as “outliers”, they don't seem to fit into any category or sequence. I've had the fantasy of some time doing a show of paintings with no identifiable thematic relationship whatsoever. It would probably be like a meal with courses that have no good reason to be together; it might be kind of sickening. Still, I'm glad to be able to photograph these things in progress, even if they never come to completion. Sometimes the results have a refreshing sense of “not-me-ness”, if that makes any sense.
Blood Moon ~ January 20th, 2019
Heading
I kept walking by this crushed stick on a path at Mountain Water. It seemed an ordinary, even childish thing to notice that it looked a little like a horse. It does remind me of the beautiful images painted and drawn on cave walls millenia ago. It got me thinking about very early people and how they could have made similar associations, and that it may have been a prod to create likenesses out of things. “This is a horse” or “This is a bison” or however these early people may have indicated their co-inhabitants. It may not have been linguistic. And it seems unlikely that they would have thought about it as “Art” in any way that humans do today. But then again such activity millenia ago may have seemed quite magical in an ordinary, reverential way. We really don't know.
New Moon ~ January 5th, 2019
Pewter Salt & Pepper
This diptych of salt and pepper shakers is currently on view at the Buddhist Arts and Film Festival in Boulder, Colorado. I'm happy to be part of this event, both as an exhibiting artist and as a panelist along with the Ven. Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche and Barbara Dilley. I'm also looking forward to the many films and presentations that the event offers. One of them is a demonstration of virtual reality that gives you the opportunity to step off a plank many stories over a city street. I'm not sure I'll be able to live through this: I can barely look at photographs of steel workers walking on I-beams eighty floors above the street. Maybe I'll stick with the films. Read more about the Buddhist Arts and Film Festival.
Full Moon ~ June 27th, 2018
Well, now...
In the process of re-doing my website I can see that some years of Moonblog entries seem a bit thin, this year's being a good example. The earlier page for Moonblog 2019 was baldly re-cycling entries from previous years as if no one reads these. It's probably true that no one is reading these! So what, really?
It's also the case that there was a pandemic brewing far away that would visit its nasty magic on the human population later that year. Not to mention that we were in the final stages of building the main studio building at Mountain Water during most of 2020. We moved in about ten minutes before the pandemic arrived. (This comment added years later, in 2025.)