Take er Easy!

“Our individuality is all, all, that we have. There are those who barter it for security, those who repress it for what they believe is the betterment of the whole society, but blessed in the twinkle of the morning star is the one who nurtures it and rides it in, in grace and love and wit, from peculiar station to peculiar station along life's bittersweet route.” -Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

Got to love that square format!

Another one of my messy-any-kid-can-do-that style of abstract art pieces.  Want to say it's about 10"x10".

I like faces. Faces, faces, faces...

{ Heart In A Diving Bell } by Big Sway

Our love is deeper than the situational

Beyond the trends of the mortal mind

Beyond moments tied in bows of timelines

We are energy of Velcro variety -

A face constructed of distraught yesterdays

& immutably grand futures -

Two needles in a haystack

Flotsam in a field of debris left by hubris

Of a deed as selfish as loving another, wholly

& with no expectations

You are so angelic

With yr derelict youth, scarred

Drinking under bridges with ratty white beards

Running from yr heart

Stained, sullied & deified with love for a dead-man

You were so vacant when I needed you most

My heart was heavy as a glacier under yr monster indifference

But a wiser artist than I saw

That in opinion/truth, I was something more than the status quo

You were never a slut,

You just listened to others too much…

I want to see nothing but yr beautiful face ascending

Past my station

Past my sadness

To a place of complete self-love

A place past me

You don’t need to work for other’s love -

Yr a dynamo that masses bathe in

You love yrself

& I love yr love

So fully

That my heart breaks apart

Every time I think about my death

& the things I’ve let slide

Left unsaid

By the roadside

I’ve been in love with you since we first met

Going around & around

Around

& around

Pretty soon

(1 to 70 years, hitherto…)

I’ll be dead

Pretty soon

So will you…

Finished Poem read at Ugly Mug's Madhouse Poety Series last month...

I go through so many feelings in a minute…

Thoughtfulness, sleepiness, beatitude… having to shit

I am sick with clever words-

Life is the leading cause of death

Death is a pathway to dissipating energy

Down the food chain swirly slide

To the lowliest, most indispensable beings

Beyond humanity

To life anew & anew

Who and what I THINK I am is so unimportant to the universe

But you can’t really LOOK to the universe for your importance -

Hell, I can’t even pin down my existence!

Being is the queerest of loitering, jowled cats, I gather

But becoming, WOH!

Be careful the serrated teeth - living on a slippery slope ‘n’ all-

Becoming is inevitable, as thee most pro-Bono human sings,

“WITH OR WITH OUT YOOOOOOOU”

Closer to a lunar verse, I chronicle my cycles - I see

Overlapping fields of vibration, each at it’s own frequency,

Wash o’er me and singularities encourage me

To the angelic savagery of spontaneity

There is always the fear of systems breakdown

Between the differing communication codes & commands…

May the good Lord have mercy on the fuzzy logic

(The bad Lord is on time-out in his bedroom on this night of the ball,

& just for nobly breaking his own commandments -

JUST for filling out the dark side of the princess’ slipper -

The vanity of schizophrenia)

-----------------

Ever notice…

A question mark looks a bit like a hook for a period?

Does the declarative hang under the question?

Do questions stand on the declarative?

Look how spacious the big, little questions we have are!

I will live in these enormous rooms

Till the walls fall down like shells from my eyes

In time, in time

Answers are dead things - bury them in the garden

Questions, duly, spring from those rotting answers

On a sure-train migration back to death’s hibernation

The fibrous, nutritional value of questions

Is necessary for yr mental digestion

As everyone knows, don’t answer where you question

Answers poison the well

With a blind ear to the power of suggestion

It’s all enlighteningly stupefying

The open door has been there my whole life

Until it became wallpaper & I forgot all about it…

The soul hungers not because it’s full of lacking

The soul hungers from an empty abundance

I hope, like me, you all have an inkling of what a soul is -

I see it as that solitary part of me that touches everything

Communes in pure sound

Pure music

Pure color

Pure form

Confused in vibrations between the will & the sub-will,

Those Siamese twins separated at a very early age

(& that’s just MY abstraction of it,

Transmitted BY abstract languages

Filtered through YOUR squishy, grey abstracting unit

& even that is an assumption

& even you are an assumption)

Yet…

That is no good reason to be sad

I still can see you dancing like a rolling wave

Affronting Salvationists in front of a spinning sky

-------------------------------

This is not an iPod for an iPod

Blue-Tooth for a Blue-Tooth

Snoop Dogg eat Snoop Dogg kind of world-

This is a world where the sly get ahead

& the simple-minded are easily led

Where’s the justice in a child unfed?

Justice is revenge dressed in absolution dressed in cold-blood red

As I put the words together, the thoughts fall apart

Like light through a prism

Like innocence in prison (innocence is destroyed by it’s proof thereof)

As I put thoughts together, words crawl into art

& sleep

& dream

Seeping through that nocturnal seam

In which the dreams reciprocally assert

--------------------------------------

My dreaming’s breath - baited lakes

Guitars play electronic butterfly songs

A lone cutter cried long snakes

Into & out of jazz connotations, elated

Looking like an early belated birthday present

A query in a mask of demands, not meant

A tumble of words - falling snatches of snow

The sound, the patter

Grey matter turned inside-out into patches of soul

The ground, the laughter,

The shark-tooth noogie boogie

The acoustic two-stroke brain trust

A name thrust into a role

A lyrical tryst between the absurd & it’s opposite pole

Painting new pictures of rust

Pictures of a smile, undressed & under duress

Sounding off, like an alarm, the loudest soft caress

Pressing an outgoing nose to the imaginary pane

To the clear and clearly insane

Or framed, we play the same sane games

To see who laughs first

To see who laughs last

Pour wax in your ears & tie me to the mast

I want it all & I want all the rest

If it’s all the same, I’ll fly the nest

& expand outwardly in concentric circles

Sweeping time-space for glow-worm holes

Looking for truth and whatever it doles

Knee-deep in heady honeycombs

All ready to rock ‘n’ roll

This life is rhythm & blues

No, you can’t multi-track

& you can’t get a back catalogue

This poem’s just a ruse

An amusingly confusing attempt at suffusing musing

Into an ugly worldview, coolly cruising for a bruising

Ripe with prison walls

Ripe for a rising fall

Wrought from music & noise

Wrought from abstraction & voice

I stand self-accused

As the gavel falls, already abused

The jury unloads

“NOT GUILTY,” the cries

I wipe sleep dust

Like a teardrop

From my ravenous eyes

I stand self-amused

Myself, I’m beside

-----------------------------------------------

Whatever it means, we’re still alive

Wildflowers blooming in a field of knives

More live painting...

I did some live painting at the Corner Brewery in Ypsilanti. I bought a 4' x 5' canvas earlier that day (60% 0ff - $40) along with a few fresh tubes of painting. I was invited by Kayj Michelle, whom I met through the Ugly Mug's Madhouse Poetry event (last Friday of each month) The event was from noon till nine in the eve. There were some great other artists there, which is nicely inspiring.

These photos are courtesy of one Darrell Mullins. He took a few hands-as-canvas pics...

And this is my favorite picture of the bunch!! CHEERS, friends!

Mural!

We have here 3 photos of a mural I just finished at a friend's home. It is always a joy to work big and it helps my buddy trusted in my vision/process.

Last post, I mentioned going to the Michigan Craft Beer Festival. At this festival, I did live painting for the Dark Horse Brewery. i told the owner, Aaron, if he brought something to paint on, he could keep it, so he brought a heavy ole door.

The first day (of the festival) was what I call "my sloppy phase". I just lay down a bunch of paint with a bunch of motion - worry less about colors. I ended up with a greyish-brown mess. This was a good phase for a beer fest.

On the second day, though, was what I call "my control phase". I lay down a bunch of lines again, inspired by the "groove" & "rhythm" of the first phase, but today I am controlled. I am QUITE concerned about colors and their balance in the piece. I paint on top of paint on top of paint, till I find that "JUST RIGHT" feel to a PIECE. Here is the finished piece in question...

I love me some Dark Horse. I am also doing a drawing that hopefully some day will be turned into a shirt or something. Enjoy...

& this is myself in my paint shirt. Not sure if I'll be able to wear it again, it is now SO caked in acrylic paint AKA plastic.

I haven't posted in forever & feel like I can maybe do that semi-regularly, nowadays. I've been pretty busy with art & work & girlfriend. I need to buckle down now & get some art cranked out. The summer fun is generally over (no more time off from work this summer, though, perhaps a few camping trips). This summer, I already went camping in Leelanau, MI for a few days (dunes, Lake Michigan, campfire races [3 days long], cider bar, winery, tom foolery), 4-day Electric Forest music festival near Rothbury, MI, as a a VIP guest of General Hydroponics & Luke Silverman (music, lasers, California friends, music, new friends, body painting, misters, dancing, dancing, bloody marys, new friends from Jackson & New Orleans, yes), 3-day Bliss Fest in the Petosky, MI-area (more music, more forest, Camp Speed Wagon, fun guys, Arrested Development, mucho drinko, much beauty to be had), & a 2 days Beer Festival in Ypsilanti, MI, as a brewery guest/VIP of Dark Horse Brewery (DH alone had 50ish beers on tap, painting a door for Aaron Morse & the DH nation, also did live painting with Unity Vibration Kombucha beer peoples, did some tee-shirts for them, got all painted up, look for future posts).

This first piece is a collaborative effort I did with a contemporary, Erik Steiger, on the banks of the N. Huron in Frog Island Park, on a log, passing the sketchbook back & forth over a time & over a few ciders. After this, I took it home & did all the blue ball-point work on it, to bring the figure out.

This, the second, piece was started at a poetry event, Madhouse Poetry Series, in Ypsilanti at the ugly Mug - After 2 hrs of laying down paint, mostly with fingers, behind awesome poets, I took it home & gave it a few lengthy touch-up sessions. Then it was finished. It is 4' x 4' & my apt doesn't really have all that much space for it, so it is, graciously, on loan to Jake & Liz. Someone at work said they saw it & thought it looked like me: something that just bursts into song & says off the wall shit - but still... they like it. So, I am happy.

This piece is 2 sessions of painting with my collaborator, Kate Reimer. We are not done yet, but we like it and the horn player is pretty sweet.

This is the tarp I painted on for General Hydroponics (on the condition, my buddy, Luke took it home with him to Portland). I titled it "Starring Kurt Russell As Pac-Man In Escape From Electric Forest". It is one of my favorites, currently.

This last picture is an AMAZING art piece from the first year I attended Burning Man. How imaginative ARE PEOPLE!? I love it.

The many faces of non-representational abstraction.

There is much control, on a sliding scale, to little control - from controlled tension to loose energy. It's all in a day's fun.