AUTUMN

I was born in October and it remains my favorite month.

On the cusp of winter, the temperatures cool and humidity drops enough to make the outside a wonderful place to be. The angle of the sun’s rays changes so that the late afternoon light becomes more reddish, and this melds perfectly with the change in leaf colors. Deeply saturated hues in the earth-colored palette begin to glow in ways unseen at any other time of year. Within the late arriving rays of a fall day, near the purple shadows of autumn, it is as if Rembrandt’s magic light has exploded into the larger physical world.

Maybe because we know that winter is soon to be upon us, the fall season contains the sweet ingredient of wistfulness, of the awareness of time slipping quickly by. That heightens the importance of appreciating and enjoying the momentary, the present, the small gifts of an ever-changing reality.

ELECTRONICS

As I write this on my computer keyboard, I think back to a time - not so long ago - when I wrote on a typewriter. Computers had not yet reached the masses. Cell phones did not exist.

As easy as it is to lament the loss of privacy (cell phones) and the deluge of information (computers/Internet) that new technologies have brought into being over the last three or four decades, it is just as easy to find pleasurable things to say about these machines.

The yin and yang of existence applies to everything, it seems, large or small.

Every time my teenage daughter is out for the evening, I am thankful that she has a cell phone.

Writing on the computer is easier and quieter than the “typer” (to use Bukowski’s phrase). The Internet is a wonder of human knowledge, curiosity, nonsense, and minutiae. Software programs like iPhoto and Garageband allow me to work with photos and music in ways unimaginable a few decades before.

We all pay a price for this of course. As an artist I am all too aware of the cheapening and dilution of certain aesthetic experiences that have been part of the worlds of painting and sculpture for centuries. Some of the intimacy, the seriousness, the erudition, the magic (for lack of a better word) has been lost in the ever-swelling tidal wave of electronically transmitted words and images that surrounds us now.

There is also the sense at present that a new global society is taking shape before our eyes. We become more aware of how much suffering exists everywhere but also how much we all have to share and how many opportunities exist to better ourselves and our world. Greed, violence and power-mongering still rule on the blue ball - but at least the electronics are available for all...........for now.

Plastic Grapes

I still have one of my first-ever oil paintings - done when I must have been about twelve or thirteen....unless my memory fails me, which would not be too unusual.
It’s painted on cheap canvas board. The subject is a banal still-life, self-consciously set up on piece of thin wood panelling. This panelling also appears as the background. My stepfather Phil had built two bedrooms in the basement of our house and he finished the walls with sheets of this wood panelling.

The lamp was an oil lamp which I remember clearly. There is the stylized coaster holder from Israel. The grapes were most likely plastic. The wine glass was a needed touch of green. And, of course, no respectable still-life that includes a wine glass and grapes could exist without the chianti-basket-bottle! The dark fabric adds an element of theatricality to the whole silly procedure.

My weak memory allows for little familiarity with the making of this thing. What strikes me is the attention to detail. I do remember painting the facets of the lamp globe reflecting the flame within. Like many students of painting, I was lost in the trees unmindful of the forest. I was certainly no Caravaggio.

I’m glad to have this old still life because I have always struggled between Classicism and Expressionism, to use two common terms. The worlds that these two ideas embody roughly frame the clash between analytical observation and freely-embraced intuition. Modernism rose out of the friction inherent in this duality and I have embraced many of the tenets of the Modernist movement. Finding the balance between the two is in my DNA and forms the basis for my art. That said, I feel today nearly as clueless as I was when I carefully finished this bad painting. The largest difference now, I suppose, is that what was once laborious is now nearly effortless and what my young self thought to be reality has since exploded into the ten thousand things.

3 AM

3AM is tonight’s middle-of-the night arising here in the middle of the world.

For a long time it seemed to be always 3:33AM.

Age brings the call of the bathroom during sleep hours and with that the possibility that sleepiness will not be waiting for me once I get back in bed. Reading, writing, getting a glass of water.....the mundane things one does to fill that void are many. Sometimes they work, sometimes not, and two hours spent restlessly awake is not unusual.

Sleep is its own universe of biorhythms, sounds (interruptions or lack of them), dreaming, movement. So many things help or inhibit sleep. Sleeping completely through the night is an anomaly for me.

It’s sprinkling outside. The occasional swish of car tires arcs through the relative silence in this room. Rain, any rain, in the midst of near-drought conditions, is welcome. I have an old clock radio that plays “natural” sounds. I always choose the constant rain sound.

So far tonight, however, it hasn’t helped.

Poem From An Unfinished Song

At Once the Sweet Sound of a Lovely Day

At the back of the house we’ve stashed a treasure
Next to the painted flower box
Thanks for the drink I love your porch.

This has been a very strange year I said
The weather is distorted should I sit
In this purple chair?

Upstairs her brother talked endlessly
into his cell phone without caring
who heard his words or was bothered by them.

At once the sweet sound of a lovely day
Washed over everything within our reach
Thanks for the drink I really hear you.

MOLAR

Yesterday my dentist yanked a large, cracked, infected, dead molar out of my gums. It was a big one, second to last on the upper right side.

Like many good citizens, I really hate going to the dentist. I have had zillions of fillings in my life. Three gold crowns. Braces. And now that my body is on the road to ruin the old fillings are falling out and within the last six months three of my teeth have had large chunks of them break off.

It is an unsettling and weird experience when a piece of a tooth cracks off. However, nothing could prepare me for the completely surreal encounter with tooth extraction. I had to have two extra shots during the procedure to beef up my numbness. Then some pushing. And then a long couple of pulls and that was that. It is a strange thing.

Afterwards comes hours of bleeding. It is one thing to have a bleeding wound somewhere on one’s body. It is an annoyance but nothing like having blood spew forth into the mouth. Now - taste - is part of the fun. Blood tastes odd.

Today the gaping hole in my mouth reminds of how human I am, yet there is little comfort in that. Instead, I imagine an ear or my nose falling off. I see scenes from the Jeff Goldblum version of The Fly in my mind’s eye.....him pulling out his nails and other body parts slipping off during his transformation to human/fly hybrid.

My tongue slips unwittingly back into the black dental hole as I begin to feel the stirrings of a human/geezer hybrid.

Grandma Rose

Grandma Rose exists firmly in my memory. I remember her distinct way of speaking, the sights and smells of her kitchen, how she stuttered while going through all of our names till reaching the right one when we were doing something wrong. She was quiet and reserved and never one to display broad emotions. She never learned to drive.......the “machine”, as my Grandpa always called whatever Buick he owned at the time.

Grandma was first married in the 1920’s to Abe Goldzwig. Abe went swimming at the YMCA with his father-in-law, my Great-Grandfather Max Schneider (who died before I was born) and somehow......some way: he drowned. Then, according to an old custom that I know nothing about, his brother Saul stepped in and offered to marry my grandmother. Saul was my grandpa.

I have few photographs of Grandma Goldzwig. One I re-discovered recently shows her walking in front of a garage, probably at their home in Miamisburg, Ohio. She is very well dressed and turns to the camera as if caught off guard.

In another photo she appears inside the store she owned with my grandpa, Fashion Dress Shop, also in Miamisburg. This photograph is dated - June, 1969 -
and she is dressed in an old-fashioned costume for some sort of town hoopla. I look at the image and think of the devastating history taking place in this country that year and I also think of how often Grandma looked this way in photos. Not exactly ill-at-ease but still slightly uncomfortable with the attention being placed on her, a bit stiff and unwilling to yield anything of her inner self.

Once, when my grandpa was in the hospital undergoing serious surgery for stomach cancer, my brother and I kept my grandma company at her house. Our family doctor had confided to me that grandpa’s chances were not good, so I was worried and also concerned for grandma’s well-being. I remember sitting with her at the kitchen table, listening as she unrolled a whole host of interesting stories from the past. She came alive as she recalled people and events from long-ago times. For me the best stories were about a distant cousin known as Red. He was someone completely unknown to me. Grandma’s words painted a vague portrait of a real character, someone who gambled and travelled around, involved in who-knows-what kind of shenanigans. He was my kind of guy - and - best of all........he was my relative.

Grandpa survived the surgery and went on to live for another decade. Grandma did not - she died before him with Alzheimer’s.

HUMANS

When I think about humans - which happens often, since I am human - the foremost notion about our species that comes to mind is this: there are too many of us.

I know that vast areas of this planet are “uninhabited” and that is fine by me. But we tend to congregate together and thus our presence on Earth tends primarily towards concentrated population zones. With the ever-advancing speed of technological innovation, comes more and more STUFF. We have become a species that loves the things we make and we surround ourselves with so many things that we allow the waste and destruction that accompanies their creation and use to remain largely outside of our consciousness. Not just the pollution that is already altering the climate globally, but also the more mundane junk that multiplies everywhere. We buy a simple doo-dad at the store and think nothing of the complicated plastic container that holds it and as we toss this plastic object into the waste can no one shudders. I do this countless times a week and I realize how ridiculous it is. One tries to be thoughtful....but the stuff keeps coming and piling up and the landfill is the new collective unconscious of the consumer society.

Most of believe we are special - humans, that is. We gaze at the extraordinary images sent to us from the Hubble telescope, images of entire galaxies reduced to lovely little swirls in a mind-boggling panoply of countless such galaxies, and then many of us wonder if we are the only inhabited planet in the universe. The utter silliness of this is on the order of the nincompoops who visit the Creation Museum and buy the snake oil package for what it is.

A wonderful object, it seems to me, is a thing of preciousness to which we may become attached in a reciprocal and meaningful relationship. Place twenty objects alongside this first object and you have reduced its specialness somewhat. The collector would disagree with this but that is a different case.

My friends in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles might disagree that there are two many humans around. But even here in the middle of the world, the change has become dramatically apparent. We seem to be everywhere.

My Mess

My studio is a complete mess right now. At least it’s my mess.
My place is large and cheap because for many weeks during the year it is too cold or too hot to do much of anything.
That doesn’t explain the mess. Yes, Cincinnati was an oven all summer long and so I set up shop in the dining room temporarily.
But the mess downtown.....remains.

Any artist will say that their studio is their sanctuary. It’s existence is the metaphorical soul of what they do.
I am always amazed at artist’s studios that are clean and well organized. I envy and admire those who are able to sustain that sort of existence.

When a dry spell has left me in a state of befuddlement as to where I am with my work, I sometimes enter the studio and promptly find myself moving things around, picking up stuff from the floor, looking through a stack of something - anything but working.
I am.....stalling.

Some of us thrive in chaos and some recoil from it.
Here in the middle of the world -
I do both.