April 1, 2010 What is this, painting in dictionary pages?
So start, right here, asking this:
What fool would tear up a dictionary and make a PICTURE out of it?
What fool would start painting her heart out when she has never taken even a single art class?
What fool
is this fool
and what is she trying to prove when she is trained to be a writer and ....
Joy.
Simply that. The goal the whole purpose in life, is
JOY.
So why not, paint, why not
play in paint.
Painting, I write more fully than I ever can
in
words can never say 1,000 words, 1 million
I will explore the intersection of word and image and emotion and consciousness and meditation and art and photography and
I am sick of writing stories that most of the time, begin and end in
Have you ever considered what fills our best stories?
death and
divorce
and illness (yeah all those cancer stories, YIKES)
betrayal
and despair of every dark hue?
Who wants to write/read that anymore?
And yet I want to be a writer I want to be a writer i want to be a
PAINTER?
I want to write narratives in paint?
oh please. Please PLEASE, I do!
Consider this:
reading stories, we spend hours with imagery
ENGLISH CLASS IS US UNTYING THE MEANING OF STORIES
and images, yes, always images
symbols all those
knots of emotion,
once we figure out what it means
and know this, authors are hardly ever sure themselves )
we rarely find ourselves
uplifted
up
LIFTED as in,
able to live better lives?
See my point is this: do stories end our sadness and give us hope?
Sometimes. A little inspiration here and there,
but just as often
despair.
How often do stories and movies
just leave us in the lurch
sobbing into our kleenex
or horrified at the inhumanity of man to man
man to woman
etc.
I.e., we the reader are left
without any gas to go home on?
Shouldn’t art lift us to life live better lives?
Back up. Youaresoundinglike some goddamed POLLYANNA.
Try this:
We communicate in painting in ways that we just cannot communicate in words. A full Ah palette, that is the word.
But who cares what words?
Consider this: we don’t go to WORD EXHIBITS. We don’t hang stories (black white printed pages) in museums for all to see. People don’t come to the same rooms over and over in flocks and flocks just to see a book on view.
We sit there with flat pages and we read. We do the linear line by line book thing. We see images maybe we see real things to us the world in our heads created out of that verbiage is one
Giant word world.
PLEASE TELL ME WHY THIS IS NOT ENOUGH that is, it’s not enough for me anymore. Not anymore, not with the world the way it is today. The world inside me? The World OWT THERE.
Reality and fiction fiction and reality, virtual this and that. No matter that you can write a thing that makes you feel as though it’s all real.
It is just as well that we read a true story as a one invented. All words flat flat that is the problem, flat and humorless.
I am struggling to define a new anew me anew Art a radical view of narrative, story, here you go it is a new story.
Call it
The Torn Page, or
Dictionary in Blue and Orange.
Or
Call it whatever you want to call it.
What can you say about this painting? What can you feel?
IMAGES GIVE US EMOTIONS THAT CANNOT BE CAPTURED IN WORDS. Surely we all know this. That we cannot say in words all things?
We don’t know so much about the brain. WE CANNOT EXPLAIN
CONSCIOUSNESS. For example, exactly what neurons are firing when we do ex, why and zee.
I know I THINK THERE FORE
I SEE THERE FORE
Can you say, I AM and know what you feel?
What do you see here? Fragments of an old dictionary. Blocks of color, fighting each other. I woke up this morning and before the brain clocked in completely I said to myself,
NOTHING WORTH WRITING.
And in the old days (maybe yesterday, maybe tomorrow) I would be lying there, practically crying.
I was/ am fighting myself. Why?
Because I am no longer a writer. OR
Maybe I am no longer that old writer, writing cold black words on a white page.
I am trying to turn myself into another kind of artist. One who isn’t tied to words one who allows “meaning” to emerge from image.
This morning, here in Washington, DC where I lived all last year, I saw an exhibit of Georgia O’Keeffe’s work
that was
Just let me say it took my breath away and I am still waiting to exhale.
She painted emotions. She gave us abstraction and She wrote letters to photographer Alfred Stieglitz talking about this very subject. Quote O’Keeffe
I woke up this morning thinking these words: “NOTHING TO WRITE.”
I have been fighting with writing for two years or more now. I have had an INNER ARTISTIC revolution I never thought I would have – I wrote stories and novels for 20 years and then, the spirit vanished. The desire is clearly not there anymore. I fell out of love with words. Or did I? Do I want to write another way?
MAYBE THE WAY TO WRITE IS Through my painting.
images. Before.
CR
