Here I am in my new studio digs, feeling like the cat got the catnip, because it’s indoors, higher ceilings, central air, located in the same building I eat and sleep in.
Yes, part of me will miss the romance of the open air that was my trek to the little converted garage on the mountain, the occasional harvest mouse that would scutter along the rafters, even the sticky black widow spiders web that would dangle from the corners of old canvases. I could even handle the ball chilling winters.
I shalln’t miss the longest hottest summer in living memory though, which along with the dust and smoke had rendered Planet Mercury as uninhabitable as-well, it’s namesake.
Looking down are some of the pieces from the new series, Paradiso’s Fall, which I just happen to be at the halfway point of, so it’ll be interesting to see if the remainder will be influenced by the new workspace.
It’ll certainly be less like camping.
Here I am, working on the beginning of the end, though still four short of that sum when all said and undone.
Had wanted to be chronological about it, do each piece in sequence, tying the whole grand finale up in a neat bow.
Then I hit a wall on the one before and apropos with all these blood moons, needed the salvation of retribution, as opposed to merely feeling like a madman chipping at a mountain with a toothpick.
What a caper this art thing is, like inclement weather eh?
It's at such times that I realize the paintings exist entirely on another plain to their earlier sketched counterparts, and looking backward is often like retracing a forgotten trail obscured by brush or at least a sable.
I realize I'm talking riddles, but the conversations I have in my head seldom make sense.
I suppose artists are just cryptologist's of their past.
The feast before Samhain is with us once again, the Danse Macabre for the fabled Aos Sí. Not for me some anecdote on a haunted gallery theme night. Anything relative to 'darker' art's is relegated as tacky as year old candy in a rotten Jack o Lantern this time of year at any rate. Much to my cost and chagrin.
Still, the spirits run freely through the studio, dark corners move and spells are cast with the wave of a sable.
And I revert to my natural state.
Happy All Hallows.
That's the new piece propped on my easel, and it strikes me that sometimes, the work I do- for all its predisposition-eerily resounds the now.
That sucking sound you hear is the canvas so dense with dark matter, it's like a black hole reflected in an ebon mirror.
It's the parable of Dante: a veritable
inferno beyond the soaring temperatures and the demons of my studio, beyond the faux outrage over a Disney Monarch shaking her skinny arse on national
tv, and a fallen crop of bloodless children littering the streets to the strains of a news anchors soundbyte. There's another ensuing war brewing like a witches cauldron in the middle east, a reactor in the orient spewing radiation like acid in a well, hubble-bubble, toil and trouble casting the shadow of an apocalyptic endpoint that both feeds the nihilists black imaginings and dismembers the optimists servant. To be an artist sometimes means being possessed with the rage of the aggrieved and the despondency of the paralyzed.
In other word's it's enough fuel to stoke the fire and extinguish it, if only because as little air that moves through the studio right now, there is no living in a vacuum at such times.
I realize its adding little to the burgeoning mire of Instagram style selfies- another not particular flattering shot of the artist in situ (et al)-but it's that time of year again, paint smeared, war torn and in the flesh as it were, a proverbial art warrior, somewhere between battling the heatwave and burning the midnight oil on canvas.
I make it sound more romantic than it is certainly.
Still you can sort of make out what I've been working on in the background-the ongoing Purgatorium duties-a sneak peak whilst you wait.
