ad infinitum

Feels like I need to explode but can't: stretched and taut, straining, straining, all tension and no release. Painting is blue-balling me.

I see what I want in other people's work -- I get inspired about colors to use, ways to resolve my compositions, and then when I face my own canvas, I absolutely flounder and every mark I make is just a new dilemma.

I hem and haw and dither, making little jabs and swipes, hoping, desperate for a point of entry. Finally, 20 minutes before I have to quit for the day, I attack the piece with giant angry strokes, usually undoing all of the fussy small brushwork I'd just spent the previous three hours creating, and that's the only decent mark I'll make all day. I hate this equation.

It seems like this is not true art-making, this haphazard accumulation of mistakes and corrections, of tentative attempts and premature declarations. I have changed! No, fuck, still the same.

How can I see what I want, imagine what I want, and not be able to create it? What is in the way? 

Can't you just picture the God of Artists, bemused, tirelessly triaging: ranters to the left, manifestos to the right; blue-balled by your own ego, here's a sharp kick to the shins. 

It's been a season of fumbling, and griping about fumbling. And reluctance to write because of the griping. 

Don't I reconcile with myself every time? I make the peace offering, I put down the brass knuckles.

*

treasure

The kids and I keep finding little chips of pottery -- at the river, mixed into the concrete on the way to the park, under the trees at Gosho. Treasures! the kids call out. I fancy that they're talismans of a sort. 

Yesterday we found a handful at the river, winking up from among the stones; today, several in the park. Walking further, I found even more, and it became too much for a poetic interpretaion. This is just broken pottery that gets mixed in with the gravel, wherever it is spread. 

Can it be both? Quotidien and meaningful? Divine interjection with a human explanation? 

Either way, I had the idea to paint them, to treat each chip as its own complete composition and see how they turn out. It seems fitting. I'm always drawn to that shade of indigo, how completely it is complimented by the creamy white. I'm just going to take that at face value and not read anything into it. 

Meanwhile: this piece is giving me fits.

The upper left corner in particular is being stubborn. Everything I've tried there looks silly.

I know I'm in a bind when I've divided the piece into quadrants like that, because then inevitably I start protecting the things I do like, when really the solution to that corner probably lies in changing something fundamental about the whole thing. 

It's getting hard to charge ahead, now that it's almost time to pack things up and head Stateside for the summer. Maybe by the time I unpack this one in the fall, I'll have found the missing piece and will know exactly what to do.

*

flight pattern

I have a recurring dream about flying.

I have some kind of machine, sleek and simple like a saucer sled, and in the beginning I can lift up and take off without a thought. I can feel the surge of power propelling me upwards, the same as opening the throttle on a motorcycle: intimate, responsive, thrilling. As the dream goes on, though, the power drains out. It diminishes until I can only take off with great effort, or, finally, am left trip-stumbling along the ground, unable to make it go.

Each time I have the dream, the details are a little different -- the scenery from above, the mechanism of the flying machine -- but the trajectory is always the same. The exhilaration of the ability to take flight, followed by the crushing disappointment of losing it. 

I had this dream the other night, and it finally occured to me that it is exactly the feeling I have about painting. 

Sometimes it's so effortless and intuitive, I really do feel propelled forward, elated by the energy of it. 

The very next day I will expect to launch myself again, and will fall ass-over-teakettle into mistake after mistake until I resign for the day, cross-eyed and cursing. 

How does it work? How do I make the thing go? I have no idea. 

I talked to Jason about it, who is a writer, so he understands the fickleness of creative flow, and he said, "yeah, and you still have to start out each day expecting to fly."

It's taken for granted, this hallmark of making art. It's the quintessential cliche: ah, the struggle. 

I can appreciate it a day or two later -- it's just the nature of the thing, and there's no use in trying to understand it. But when I'm in the thick of it I want to break brushes, slash canvases, rend garments. I want to pull down the curtain and see everyone else's mistakes. 

It's lucky to fly, and it's out of my control. My work is to stand up again, arms extended.

*

a good look

On the bus the other day I was sitting in the back near a small group of Australian tourists, and I eavesdropped as they chatted about their shopping exploits and temple visits. They were in high spirits, gabbing away and laughing loudly. 

My first impulse was to turn to the Japanese woman on my other side and apologize for them. I'm sorry -- they don't know how loud they are. On a Japanese bus, all is civilized and quiet: personal space is carefully demarcated, and conversations are discreet. In this setting, loud foreigners seem positively barbaric. 

I didn't want to be implicated by association. So I did that annoying thing that ex-pats do here to show they're not tourists: I avoided looking at my fellow foreigners, definitely did not smile, and waited for an opportunity to say something clever to my seat-mate in Japanese.

Then I realized what was happening. I was seeing myself reflected in them -- their English, their flushed faces, their gratuitous body language, in a way that I never see myself reflected in Japanese people. It was startling to recognize myself so suddenly, like looking into a mirror when I was expecting a window. 

This may be the most disconcerting thing about being a gaijin, there is a clear line between inside and outside, and an irreconcilable tension between wanting to be unremarkable on the one hand, but visible and recognizable on the other hand. 

Donald Richie sums up the feeling in The Inland Sea, "Like all Americans, like all romantics, I want to be loved -- somehow -- for my precious self alone."

I decided to let the Australians go ahead and be rowdy on the bus and enjoy their vacation, let the stereotypes go unchallenged. 

But it stuck with me the rest of the day: who is this self that needs reflecting? 

*

I spend so much time studying faces, reading the stories they hold, deciphering the light behind the mask.

When I paint, my concerns are purely about color and value and the quality of the brushstrokes -- rendering the marvel that is human skin, translating the planes of the features into a mosaic trompe l'oeil.

study for Amie, 8 x 10", oil on paper

When I'm done it's always somewhat of a surprise to see a person there. 

I study my own face too, sometimes with bemusement, sometimes with cool apprehension. As with my art, I am eager to know what others see, at the same time that I feel embarrassingly exposed. What makes a good painting? What makes a face open, like an invitation?

When I go looking for mirrors, I get windows.

*

concretion

It didn't take much to finish this piece... A quick swipe of yellow, a little extra white washed over the blue like a veil.

It's one of those pieces that, at the end, I wish I'd taken pictures throughout the process to remind myself how it evolved, but when I'm in the midst of it I can't be bothered. Who wants to format and sort and arrange a dozen images, each just incrementally different than the last? I should hire someone, maybe. 

 

In this case it would have been appropriate to document its accumulation of layers, though, because it's ABOUT layers. I guess all of my abstract work lately is about layers, but the title for this one came in a little flash and seemed so fitting: "The Irritation Creates the Pearl."

When shelled mollusks are threatened by injury or parasites or other foreign intrusion, they secrete calcium carbonate to coat and neutralize the irritant. It's the same distinctive irridescent substance that lines the shells themselves, called nacre. In the inner mantle, the soft tissue of the mollusk, around the irritation, the concentric layers of nacre build a pearl. I read that the mollusk will continue adding these layers for the rest of its life.

I wonder if we are capable of this, too... building beautiful concretions around our wounds and irritations. Scar tissue isn't merely defensive, after all, it has a certain luster. 

The more I think about it, the more it makes sense to have just the one image. The finished piece. It contains all its layers, some of which are secret. Just like yours and mine.

*

as we go

The kids are back in school after their year-end break: Isla in a new class at kindergarten, and Auden, suddenly, impossibly, a First Grader. He barely made the cut-off date, starting just days after his 6th birthday. 

Now he walks to and from school with a group of other kids in the neighborhood. Even though we've been inching toward this kind of independence -- by sending him to the corner store for tea and snacks, and by not having heart attacks when he walks to the park by himself -- I am still finding it almost preposterous that we have reached this stage. I'm guessing the stomach roiling subsides after a while?

Isla likes to run around outside too, and hide in the narrow spaces between houses, in doorways, in the maze of narrow streets around our house. When I find her, she squeals with laughter, looking mischievous and triumphant. 

This is probably the safest place we could possible live, but I still have to fight a rising panic when I'm not entirely sure where they are. 

The other day they packed their carry-on suitcases full of toys and wheeled them out to the street, stopping at one friend's house, and then another, which I didn't discover until after I had gone full bore, riding my bicycle through the neighborhood, calling their names.

What kind of double-edged sword is this, anyway? The minute they stop needing me at their side every minute, I become freakishly masterful at conjuring catastrophic What-Ifs. 

Here they are, discussing their plans to travel to Bulgaria.

I want them to have this freedom, I want them to discover things on their own... Especially here, where they own what they find in a different way: words, connections, patterned pottery shards embedded in the concrete on the road to the park.

I suspect there's no other way to offer this except to practice as we go. So if you want me, kids, I'll be in the kitchen not having heart attacks.

*

the essence of which

We all try to capture, in a picture. In hundreds of pictures. Humans out in droves, smitten with trees.

I laugh but I do it, too: aim my camera at one frothy pink cluster after another, delirious at the beauty of it.

I know the pictures will render them flat, stripping away the enchantment of the whole scene, which is in their dimension, their presence. But I can't help it, I am compelled, swooning. Clicking.

It's like being under a lacy waterfall, a lilting, living veil.

I walk through it, aware and existing and enthralled, and still I can't get enough. Is this why the pictures? To take it home and keep a part of it, no matter how small and approximate?

Even on our bike ride home, I am reluctant to quit the chase, drawn in by the honeyed light through the branches, caught in a blizzard of falling petals when the wind gusts over the river. How can we not feel beneficently blessed? 

The moment is already passing, cameras be damned. The trees are leafing out, the streets look like they've been littered with the most elegant confetti, such a party as it has been. 

*