Icarus.

"Lament of an Icarus"

Charles Baudelaire

Those men who cuddle whores for love

Are sated by their darlings' charms,

But I have only tired arms

From having hugged the clouds above.

Thanks to the stars, the matchless ones

That flame within the depths of skies,

All I can see with burnt-out eyes

Are dark remembrances of suns.

In vain I've tried to find the heart

Of space, to venture deeper, higher;

Under who knows what eye of fire

My weary wings will break apart;

And burned by love of beauty, I

Will not achieve my poignant wish

To give my name to the abyss,

The tomb below, to which I fly.

Full-Circle.

"Sorrow is not in death but in loneliness, and conflict comes when you seek consolation, forgetfullness, explanations, and illusions."
Jiddu Krishnamurti

          
Tomorrow is the autumnal equinox of 2010.
To most, I would imagine it would mean little to nothing; but to me it means everything. It's another indicator that another season in my life has faded into obscurity and passed. Now, like the phoenix I must begin anew; collect my ever-present fears, and ride along with the sun in it's transition until another year has passed into obsolescence, then the inevitable of quietus and fading of from the mind.
        
These past five years have been the biggest, emotionally-straining roller coaster of my thus-known life. A string of deaths, turbulent romances, and a coming-to-terms with personal issues have inhabited the core of my world. Sure, everyone has problems. I am not the one to make a spectacle of my life story on the internet for all to see the intricate and gruesome details of the players and situations involved.
So why am I writing this?

It all began in the late spring of 2005.
It was one of those excruciatingly bright and hot mornings as far as I can remember. The doorbell rang downstairs, and I ran down to find my Uncle who had paid a surprise visit at the time, bestowing me with his treasured violin. He told me that he wanted me to learn it, since he now could not find time for it.

                                                                            (2005.)

Over the next few months he and I developed a closer friendship, and he became more of a brother than an uncle. He taught me how to rock climb, how to mountaineer, and we became climbing partners of sorts. We would often go to Stoney Point and boulder around; all the while discussing the most random of topics ranging from eastern philosophy, to how many fist-fights we've accumulated in our lives thus far.
In the late Autumn of 2005 he left to go to Alaska.
The Violin remained in it's case.
This is when the problems in both of our lives began to come to fruition; upon returning in spring of 2006, he had been diagnosed with terminal brain and bone cancer. The doctor told him he would not live three months.
I began to drive him to his appointments that June. The man I had so looked up to for teaching me to scale vertical walls of rock in a matter of seconds I had to help up the stairs to his apartment.
But still he persevered, determined as ever to fight on, and he lived. We were all grateful beyond belief that he had survived and triumphed over his ordeal.
The violin remained untouched, say, except for the occasional plucking out of boredom here and there.
          The next sequential wave of years swept many people away from my grasp; leaving so many things unsaid for myself. Whether it be a multitude of apologies, curses, thank-you's, or just moments lost.

It struck again last fall.
I took him to an appointment one day last winter, and he asked me in the waiting room, "So, when are you going to learn that Violin?"
Winter came to an end, and he didn't make it through.


Tomorrow, I am buying rosin.
I have contacted a teacher, and next week I begin my lessons.

                                                                          

On Existentialism.

I was reading Jean-Paul Sartre's treatise on the subject of existentialism, and I really enjoyed this segment:


"A man is involved in life, leaves his impression on it, and outside of that, there is nothing. To be sure, this may seem a harsh thought to someone whose life hasn't been a success. But, on the other hand, it prompts people to understand that reality alone is what counts. That dreams, expectations, and hopes warrant no more than to define a man as a disappointed dream, as miscarried hopes, as vain expectations. ["..."] What we mean then is that a man is nothing else than a series of undertakings, that he is the sum, the organization, the ensemble of the relationships which make up these undertakings. When all is said and done, what we are accused of, at bottom, is not our pessimism, but an optimistic toughness."

Statement of intent

I realized earlier that I had not posted my artist statement of intent anywhere on this site. So, following the paintings post, here is a more brief version of my statement of intent.

---

I am interested in creating images as an entry point to view the projected manifestation of desire, the mortality of the flesh, and the topography of history and memory.
It is about the intersections of loss and desire; an inextricable balance of presence and memory. It is also about the psychology of what it means to bear witness, or even what it means to be forcibly turned askance from an event.
On a formal level, the content of my work is fixed and stable, yet filled with a degree of instability, confusion and nausea through the obscuration of the subject matter. It heavily relies on the idea of the perception of the image; the denial of the versimilitudinous nature of images. This implicates an imminent downfall, hypoxia, and quietus within the work itself, which is thus muted within it’s own anxiety, somewhere between truth and a void.

---

Various Paintings 2009-2010

Some Various works of mine from this past year (2009-2010).

Enjoy.

"Self Portrait" 2010. Gouache on panel.

Bundled and layered in the freezing studio, fall 2009.

.

Elm
-----
BY SYLVIA PLATH
-----


I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.

Is it the sea you hear in me,
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?

Love is a shadow.
How you lie and cry after it
Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.

All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously,
Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf,
Echoing, echoing.

Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons?
This is rain now, this big hush.
And this is the fruit of it: tin-white, like arsenic.

I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires.

Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs.
A wind of such violence
Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek.

The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me
Cruelly, being barren.
Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.

I let her go. I let her go
Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery.
How your bad dreams possess and endow me.

I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.

I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?
Is it for such I agitate my heart?

I am incapable of more knowledge.
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches?——

Its snaky acids kiss.
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults
That kill, that kill, that kill.

A revision of earlier work.

The Brevity of my life was a mere flash
in the cosmic whirlwhind.
Beyond the fracture
I descend
beyond the surface
I’ve pierced
Beyond the silver lining
Collapsing inward
A serpent devouring
It’s own eternity
The tide of emptiness is subsumed back into itself
Lethe is beckoning me once more
I am uncertain
It might be too silty, too brackish
Here I stand on the shore of my own consciousness
The shallow, murky water of time and space
I listen for the call
Fingertips
Needles
Grasping time before me
Useless actions
Don’t look back upon those woods, never
The tree sheds it’s leaves
perhaps indiscriminately
I shed my thoughts here out of necessity
then I collect them in fetal position
Wildfires scorch me in these woods too often
I used to find solace here
Bitter thoughts can take root
if the cold doesn’t take you first

My bones are brittle
years of leaning against the winds
blowing in from the void
Chapping my Eyes, wrists, and mouth
I cannot speak
without cracking some way or another
Sometimes I hear your voice
reverberating in my own
Moving dusty furniture around in my interiority
Asthmatic spasms of recollection

I swim out
fervently thrashing my body against the breaking waves
What does it mean, when my feet are no longer grounded?
As above, so below

Lethe is an ocean
Rivers are too shallow, with some sort of terminus
My mouth is shut
I will not drink

1986-1994: White Light Bled Forth

Tiny arms outstretched to the heavens
Not to the cyan oblivion
Nor absorbing the golden spectrum of the sun
But instead outlining the unobtainable
Blinding pit of the sky.

Wide-eyed, an impressionable mind
I collected fog on the window from hot breath
Blanched light; the color of god, the intangible heavens above me.
The universe, through a child’s eyes
Unstained
Ultimately Neutral
Limited in depth, and paltry in perception
A projection of naivety upon the glass
Bleeding light from my fingertips onto the surface
Revealing a world, with borders not yet resolute
Tracing shadows of the realm outside
Sometimes from the inside out
Sizes of objects indicating some hierarchal order
Of the pure heart and mind.

Sometimes we shut our eyes firmly
The brilliance of the world illuminated
Is too much to bear

In our youth we must first be blinded
Before we turn askance from each other
To see things as they are.
The only true teleology is indifference
And it diverges us, purges us from kinship
It washes away the dust of perception
With the deluge of judgment

Nineteen ninety four
The date I opened my eyes
succumbing to the floodwaters
That filled my body with bleach
and white light at my core
The burden of reality
is quite oft indiscriminate
We pass through the spectrum
and right to the floor of the earth
Side by side
ripped asunder

Cento poem, June 2010


Fallen. From a lofty place
The minor is always the undoing of the major
A tiny fainting spell:
A lapse, a descent, a fall
Intoxication, loss of consciousness, loss of self.
One cannot see any ice near the fire

A fall into self made with the explicit purpose of losing the self in desire
The greatest brightness, short of dazzling, sets near the greatest darkness

Color itself is a degree of darkness
The living strives towards color-
Alcohol drives color away
Color is killed in favor of form
The dream is always on the edge of nightmare

We have no sense of direction; we drift.
An abyss; disorientation, loss of consciousness, descent
Substances appear in color because they have released themselves from the moon-
the sun can give them nothing more
The sky was night, fury, and death; earth is clear sky, sunlight, and warmth
Eyes closed, drugged, unconscious
A gracious woman portrayed naturalistically
is not killed
but murdered
The individual is wanting in judgement
Just as a dream inhabits it’s own proper atmosphere,
so a conception, become composition
Thoughts stand still.