Fertile Ground

"Fertile Ground", acrylic on  16" x 8" canvas

A couple was lying in the grass.  Their world was one another.

The happenings of a festival surrounded them - people walked back and forth, a band played on the stage.

The activity meant nothing to them, or everything.  It framed their moment, and this moment was all there was.

"So I'll be king and you'll be queen
Our kingdom's gonna be this little patch of green.."

James Taylor understands moments like this: 

This is only the second "serious" painting I have done in acrylics since I first picked them up after dabbling with them many years ago.

Here is what I love about acrylics:  the opportunity to use impasto, to leave brush strokes in the painting; to feel like I am molding form, and to control the vividness and vitality of my color without effort.

To paint the figures, I purposely followed the procedure of laying in the darks first, then the lights, and finally the middle tones.  At first this system felt mechanical - awkward - but once I got to the middle tones, and then began editing back and forth, I felt free and creative.

I am working on my next acrylic painting, which would be done except for an error I need to correct (which could take as long as the rest of the painting took - who knows?)  I painted this next one in a completely different way.  I am also painting in watercolors, and drawing in ink, and doing ink and watercolors.  I am always sketching people around me.

The ground feels fertile, and the grass is indeed green.  Each moment painting is a magical moment.

And I am grateful for these moments.

Still Here

Ink and watercolor in moleskine, sketched on site, colored later

Ya gotta hand it to James Taylor. I didn't know quite what to say in this post - I had too many words or to few, and then he sang it in only a few simple words: "So the sun shines on [a] funeral just the same as on a birth, the way it shines on everything that happens here on Earth."

Good 'ole James.

The sun continues to shine no matter what happens.

The old doomsayer in the news got it wrong. All he managed to do was give millions of young men across the globe the chance to use the greatest line ever for seducing young ladies, starting with "baby, the world is ending tomorrow.."

But the world is still here, and will hopefully continue to be here for some time yet. The headline on Google News this morning was "World Still Here". And this is good.

Ink and watercolor in moleskine, sketched on site, colored later

I grabbed my wife's Good Housekeeping magazine the other day (June 2011 issue) because there was an interview with Michael J. Fox, whom I greatly admire. He has Parkinson's Disease, and seven years after he was diagnosed, Mr. Fox had a revelation, and we can all benefit from his hard-learned lesson.

He says that having such a disease is like being in the middle of the road in cement shoes with a bus heading straight towards him. He knows it's going to hit him some day "but you don't know when".

Life for all of us is like that if you think about it, although more subtle. We never know what will come next. We do know where we will all end up, though, although we don't know when or how.

It was difficult to be diagnosed with such a disease. But eventually Mr. Fox remembered being taught as an actor to play each act in turn and not to focus on the final act, no matter what might or might not take place then. And he realized that he didn't have to "play the result" in life until the end either. Until that day, "there is all kinds of room in that space."

We can borrow his philosophy for our lives as well, of course. We can worry about all of the things that might happen in a given situation, but that's playing the result, isn't it? We can dwell on what might occur or dwell on a past event, but then we are not playing the act we are in.

We can give ourselves permission to play, to imagine, to enjoy, in our space.  That is truly living.