HokeyPokeyists {Pam Murphy}

"Heirloom", Murphy, oil, 32"x27"

This morning Jen and I got onto this old joke, what if the hokey pokey really is what’s it’s all about. We had been talking about how dogs think in pictures and we were talking about it as if we really know dogs think in pictures. Point of fact. And it struck me how often in our individual and collective minds we think we now know the truth. Now we know what the world is made of and all those other people who came before us well they tried and maybe even added in some critical information but now we Know. The hysterical thing is that daily we find out one hard fact or another isn’t quite right, often dead wrong.

Yet being mistaken almost all the time makes not so much impression on our fundamental belief that we know who we are, where we are, why we are here and what to do about it. Study history and it seems as if most all people who came before us knew everything too.

Children often question everything. In Pam Murphy paintings children figure prominently. The children are seriously going about the business of childhood. There is something about the paintings that open a narrative door for the viewer. The stories I hear are frequently compelling. In the paintings we gaze at the child facing their uncertain future with determination, bravery, welcome or worry. We see ourselves and our loved ones.

What I like best about Pam’s paintings is they help us see ourselves as we really are, doing our best. Maybe in the future we will find that we were mistaken, but for now, carry on, do the hokey-pokey.

"Girl V", Murphy, oil, 24"x23"

Persevere {Rich Gombar}

"Winter Dressing", Gombar, oil, 14"x20"

Persevere is not my favorite word. I think of work with little indication of success. These are new Rich Gombar paintings. Rich paints atmosphere and light with maybe some building thrown in. Rich has been painting in this vein since college, quite a few moons ago. Sometimes I get a painting from Rich and the back has two or three dates on it, often spanning decades. A simple landscape with a barn and it took him twenty years to get it right.

Of my painters, Rich’s simple landscapes are the ones that prompt people to ask me how long did it take him to do that? The thought being that the simplicity of forms in the painting equals its ease of execution. What is harder to detect is the subtle working of the paint, how just the right light quality is rendered without much ado.

Painting like this is like watching a plant grow, without access to trick photography nothing much seems to be happening. Growth in many aspects of our lives is like that, persevere, endure, persevere. Gombar’s paintings mark the great beauty we sometimes glimpse for our efforts.

"Light in August", Gombar, oil,  24"x36"

Mapping {Eric Angeloch}

"No. 4",  Angeloch, oil, 30"x30"

I know you know what happened today. That’s right, I could not find where I pulled that mysterious shovel head out of the ground yesterday. It’s going on ten years that I have walked those 10 or 12 acres of woods, the shovel head was right in one of my usual paths. As surprised as I was yesterday to trip over something I walked by hundreds of times I am not so surprised that I couldn’t find the evidence today.

Mysteries are like that. Most of our lives are mysteries much as we try to fake ourselves into believing we are in charge and control. A flash flood destroying a Village has a certain way of ripping that consciousness to shreds. Art, the making and the viewing of it, has the same power though usually more gently wielded.

"No.10", Angeloch, oil, 30"x30"

These are new Eric Angeloch paintings. Eric paints his feelings. He uses his memories and impressions of cloud formations and storms to express his feeling state on canvas. I have shown Eric’s work for 10 years now. Over the years one person after another has looked at an Eric painting and named a specific place that is the painting. Yet Eric makes up his landscapes, it is not a specific place and Eric’s landscapes often defy our physical landscape by their characteristics.

Still I would say that Eric paints the truth. Things often seem to be pretty much as we feel them to be, whether great or good enough or lousy. Change how we feel and we have essentially changed how we are. Sounds simple enough. And it is and isn’t. Like a good painting somewhere embedded in the process of change and creativity is mystery. A painter like Eric works and stands there and looks and works and thinks and stands there some more, open and ready for something unexpected and enlivening to happen on the canvas. It’s a sweaty process and it doesn’t always work. I think of Eric’s paintings as compelling records of self change, maps that he offers us, “Here, here is how I made it through that dark passage, so may you.”

"No. 4", Angeloch, oil, 30"x30"

Mysteries

Rosie and I walked up to check on the tile this morning. The tile is a cement holding tank set into the ground, at the bottom of the tank is a pipe that feeds water to my house. It’s a gravity fed spring water system. We were making our way down and around through the woods when I tripped over the top of a pipe sticking up out of the ground.

I knew there were old wells in that section of woods, I could not resist pulling on the pipe.  Could I be opening a covered up well? Would I lift up the pipe and be standing next to a deep Alice in Wonderland type hole? Would the pipe even budge?

It budged, it was a shovel. I didn’t expect that. It was a shovel without a handle in the middle of the woods. The shovel was in the ground the way you would stick a shovel in the ground during a job or at the end of the digging or filling in part of the job. I have left my garden shovels tucked into the ground like that many times. To the best of my knowledge I retrieve my shovels long before the handle has completely disappeared and the woods have reclaimed where I was working.

We can carbon date but we can’t make objects talk and spill their beans. We try. We try to understand everything.

Love

Last Friday's Post:

Love was the word today. And there was a lot to love about the day, the final touches of spruce up the town for the holidays got finished, I had really good pizza for dinner and it was not windy. Still I was a bit perplexed about the word of the day till I remembered my mother. Tomorrow is the second anniversary of her death.

My mother was a very charming woman, not so much to her children. I believe she thought if she showed us affection we might be too content to potty train. Seven children. But in her dying days which were about ten, she smiled and said I love you upmteen times a day. On the days she had strength she interspersed her love words with her regular ‘straighten ups’ to her offspring.

Here’s one scene: my sister leans over the hospital bed rail and says “Hi Mom I love you” to the  fading one who responds, “Wow, you have a big bum.” My sister, 40 something years old, thinks my mother could not have said that, and in an effort not to have those be the last words she hears her mother speak to her, says, “What Mum?” Giving my mother the chance to smile and say again “You have a really big bum”. Four or five siblings, a niece maybe, a cousin or two are in the room and we are not deaf nor dumbfounded. With the relief akin to sniper fire survivors, we giggled and snickered.

At the very end it was just my mother and myself. It was wonderfully conscious and peaceful, three times my mother smiled smiles I did not know were humanly possible, they were the definition of beatific. I don’t have any idea what follows this life if anything at all, but my often sharp mother’s death, it was holy.

So then what about those poems, love is always gentle and never unkind, blah, blah, blah. Is it possible that love is also like my mother and our gentle river that raised up and wailed us. A confluence of events occurred in the river’s core and we were in the way, hard as it to fathom, it wasn’t personal.

A tricky cheesy word

The Original Mary Mary

Alright as it is Sunday I should admit I got another cheesy word, last Friday. A quite tricky cheesy word, it is love. It took all day on Friday for me to make a connection to the word, not that there were not plenty of things I loved about the day but I thought the word was love in a capital kind of way.

Late in the day I made the link to the word and the second anniversary of my mother’s death. My mother was a tricky charming woman, and writing about her is even trickier especially because like love in a capital kind of way, it seems just when you think you have it all figured out the target moves.

I am going to give this topic a whirl for the next few days if you will keep in mind that I am aiming with clunky words at a shape shifting target.

Music to my Ears

Sitting for treats

In the morning or the very late night as it is, the cats run around making noise about 15 minutes before I get out of bed. Lu the calico, has many ways of making noise besides galloping. As this is an old house all doors close themselves. Lu removes the door stop in my bedroom and lets the door slam. Then Lu goes around and pushes the same door open from the other side so that, yup, it slams again. Lu also opens drawers,cabinets and cupboards and empties them. She especially likes the under the kitchen sink trash cabinet.

This morning the cats were completely quiet, completely. It got so that I was concerned. And then a clear ping rang out, like a metal gong had been rung. In case I thought I imagined that, and again, pinnggg. I got up. Lu was sitting on the kitchen table (I know) looking as pleased as could be. It was then that I saw my felt necklace in the dog’s metal water bowl. Apparently my felt necklace, her deft paw and the dog’s water bowl, perfect gong.

I know she thought that was just brilliant and hilarious, I do too.