Conversation Styles Differ

Hot Air

Conversation Styles Differ .... Well that's an understatement. For some, conversation is a stream-of-thought run-on-sentence without punctuation or paragraph marks. Do you talk incessantly in ever widening circles as a way of thinking out loud? As a self-soothing smoke screen to fill up the space between you and another person? If so, this is written for you.

Some other people (including me), need to breathe and have silences in a conversation. We need a meaningful deep pause to collect our thoughts and share or to respond to a speaker. If there are no silences then we will just let the speaker go on and on.

I am listening, but I might be four sentences behind your rapid speech, thinking that what you said doesn't make any sense, seems out of proportion, relies on circular reasoning or a 'straw-man' argument, or that there are facts you mentioned which were improvised out of thin air. Or that this is the 3rd time you said the same thing. Sometimes I see an assumption you have made about me which is upsetting.

But you are six or seven paragraphs ahead of me now, chatting on all by yourself, making more statements that make no sense. So I think - there are so many disparities in this that it's pointless to bring it up any of them - so I let you go on and on and on even though I am beginning to feel beleaguered, buried under all the words.

And you wont find out for weeks that that my ex-husband is dead, or that I locked myself out last night at midnight and had to climb in through the window. At some point I might seem to be getting tense. I might quite suddenly say - "let's change the subject." or "I have to go now." I might quite suddenly, vigorously object to the last thing you said -- but the arc of it is this:

You have created a lengthy machine gun attack of words, and I have finally responded by running into an underground bunker and closing the door.

Paintings: Spacious No 1 & 2

Though I have put up Spacious No 3 - I had not written about Spacious 1 & 2 yet. With the caveat that the color is a little off in these photos, here they are:

--- Spacious No. 1 ---

....

--- Spacious No. 2 ---

Both of the these paintings had more garish beginnings than is apparent here.  They both hung for years in the house before I finally knew what to do with them...  Spacious No 1 on the left, had green and purple clouds that looked for all the world like intestines. And that is what bothered me about it.  Spacious No 2 had a garish sunset, and I do mean garish.  Ultimately I went for a sense of spaciousness over jumpy colors that I didn't think worked well.....

The link to a post on Spacious No 3: http://puzzleddragon.wordpress.com/2011/02/09/painting-spacious-no-3/

Painting: Anyone

This is my 501th post on this blog. Woohoo!

Humans hold many kinds of commonality - via inheritance as well as history. We are connected over centuries by the tranmission of handed down culture as well as hand me down genes. We have a common animal nature and energy that expresses itself in countless individual ways. We are many and one. Any one.

The materials here are watercolor pencil and gesso on paper.

Painting: North Country Scene

This scene was inspired by my years in Maine and New Hampshire. I started painting this when I lived over a junk store in Cornish. I think now, finally, it's done. It's oil on an 8 x 10 canvas board. Wrong it's actually on 9 x 12 canvas board. I was close.

Painting: Spacious No. 3: The Dry Lands

These mountains, rising in the distance under an expanse of sky, began their existence looking like scenery on the planet MARS. The underpainting I used for this oil-on-canvas-board scene was cadmium red.  You can see it clearly in the stage on the right. The main shapes of the mountains and the road line were immediately laid in with a soft cloth. I learned this technique when I went to a SCANart.org demonstration where a painter used it to build  a flower painting.  The red was hard to give up though, so this painting ended up as a Southwestern sort of scene.  I thought the colors were off, but a friend who'd lived out west told me this is how the mountains look at a certain time of year.  I'm not positive that I'm through with it.  I have terrible urges to add items to the foreground such as a rusty pickup, a gates, an oil derek, a wagon wheel, an OKeefe-eske skull, or an antique gas pump, or aburro, etc. etc - all the usual Western sterio-typical items. I am trying to resist this urge.

One thing I like about this painting is a funny effect the sky has in different light. Sometimes the clouds almost seem to have a depth, I think from the layering of blue and white that I used. Sometimes it looks like it must be raining over the mountains. Sometimes it looks like dusk, and there is a city on the other side of the mountains - giving off a glow.  It's quite odd. And I am not sure if I could reproduce it.

It occurs to me that I have not posted Spacious No 2, nor Spacious No 1 - so I guess I am ahead of myself somehow.

Painting: The Riptide Within aka Brain Chemistry

UPDATED WITH NEWER VERSION OF THE PAINTING in Feb 2011

A human being, torn in multiple directions,  struggles but is unable to break free!  To me this is a visual representation of how I felt the greater portion of my early adult life: caught in a subtext of hormonal machenations, fighting overwhelming emotions. It's inspired by the mood swings of my youth... So much of what we are is about brain chemistry and DNA.  Studies of identical twins separated at birth are quite bewildering. Some marry women with the same first name and buy the same style of eyeglasses. Yet nurture and experience alter the brain as well, alter our paths. The brain, once thought immutable rewires itself, its chemistry can change.  So much is still unknown...  This is an oil painting on canvas board. It was begun around 1990 and finished late last year.

PAINTING: The Glaring Irregularity again

Update Mar. 9, 2011  This painting drives me to drink well, coffee.

VOLCANO PIC CHANGES AGAIN!! And Again! And Again. And Again.

Updated Jan 20, 2011 -->  "The Glaring Irregularity!" This painting has gone from just odd, with a Greek classically clad family standing at an angle, to bizarrely dragonesque, to google earth meets black velvet, to Google earth meets VanGoh to lava spill in candyland. At this point it is all about undulation, oscillation, periodicity somehow. Everything comes in waves in this pic now.  Although I like this version in someways, I miss the very first version with all the crazy eccentric lava.  Sigh. Let's give it a few days and see....

I am beginning to understand something. I need to preserve the eccentricities somehow, but in a way that serves the overall composition. I am most likely to use this cronic revisionism when I don't have an overall composition in mind at the start of the painting. Scroll down for pervious versions.

PREVIOUS UPDATE  -- I have altered this so many freaking times and still I am not statisfied with this painting. I would like to be able to throw it out. But I just can't. I need to nail it down in some way that pleases me for more than five minutes. But in the night version here, the smoke bothers me. I want something to unify the composition. ( I think because of the previous tentacles picture it became parallel lines.. hmmm.)

After  seeing pictures and videos of Mr Etna erupting in Italy -  I just had to revise  this picture!!!  MORE RED!!!  that's what  Eli Cleary told me.  Okay I am not yet done with it..... and of course I am nuts.  I just can't seem to stop. I actually showed the second to last version of this. But it still bothered me. Someone said the lava looked like a dragon. And I could see it didn't follow the land contures but seemed vertical somehow.  SO here is yet another incarnation of the same canvas. I might change the title too.

PREVIOUS UPDATE:  Below is the version that I showed at Artwell in 2010: Between The Darkness and The Deep. What promoted me to change that one is I couldn't get the lava to lie down on the landscape.. hmmm. I don't know what's come over me, painting a semi-readable landscape. My usual fair is oddities like the very first version at the bottom .

I like  the early eccentric version a lot. It is a  completely different painting that I wish I still had!   Apparantly I am painting the eccentricity right out them I think and I don't know why! I seem to be going though a pseudo reality phase....  It might have to do with my new reading glasses.  I had  quite a stigmatism in the left eye which some new glasses correct. When I first used them, every thing on the right seemed bigger than it should. In the original version, what prompted me to begin changing things was I could figure out what the people were standing on. Then I couldn't figure out where the horizon was since the Island was tilted. Probably due my stigmatism.  I guess my brain had learned to compensate..... To the left is the lava that looked like a dragon. To the right is my favorite version:

Painting: Cold Quiet Tranquil

There is a feeling I get when I look out the window at night and snow is falling, relentless and silent.   When my dog Oggi was alive. we often took late walks in falling snow. Sometimes I still do. In the dark snow, I feel expansively alert and connected to everything, yet also filled with a strange sense of deep peace. For a few years I lived in Maine, so I have a passing acquaintance with the desolate beauty of winter in the north country. This is an older style landscape, a bit hallmark for my taste.  It belongs to my mom who asked me recently  "Is there ever a painting of  yours that you are actually finished with?"

When I look at it now, I feel that same peaceful sense as when I look out the window in a quiet spell of falling snow ....  So yes, I think it is done.  It's oil on 8x10 canvas board.

Painting: Busy No. 2 - Tentacles

In darkness - who knows what is waving its tentacles frantically about? This is a sort of an obsessive vision. Once I started I couldn't let it go.  The style began with a previous work Cat Dreams, which is more readable, and notches that style it to a frantic, uncomfortable rush. It's oil on canvas board. Like the previous bit "In the Museum" I am not expecting a lot of folks will like it. But some how I needed to make it anyway. Below are earlier stages of the work where I envisioned the lines as highways, even added cars. Some may prefer these but I favor the end result at the right.

 

In The Museum: on our relationship to art

Our relationship to "art" (visual, literary, musical, theatrical etc) is complex, if we have one that is. Some don't ever look . If they did they might be surprised and find they relate to at least some of what they see. Is there possibility for us in works of art? A vision of  our humanity of our world of beauty or ugliness?  Is there a nobility we aspired to but didn't realize? A tarnished part we hide from everyone?   Are we more alive after facing and acknowledging these odd truths about ourselves? Just asking questions.

This is the first of a batch of works I've finished recently  but have not yet posted. This is an odd one.  It's oil on canvas board.  Below is a very rough sketch of mine on which it is based, though it differs considerably from the sketch. As stated, the visual metaphor here are about our interaction with art our relationship to art.

- Mar  Walker

Painting: one last tweak on Blue Velvet - the cat

What did I change in this painting?  Yes!  The cat didn't fit. No cat I have ever known would sit with its back to two persons as they approached it outside. Most cats would skitishly prepare to run somehow, then look back to see if they were still approaching, stopping if the people involved made a friendly noise. With everything else so delicately poised, it seemed wrong to me to have the cat so solid and seated. So I fixed it. The lines work better now as well with the cat's tail leading to the arm, leading to the faces...  Note the cat above and the cat in the version below.

The original drawing was called Bad Date as I mentioned in an earlier post. As you can see, it was energetic and threatening. Needless to say, the feeling of this painting is a gentle one, and does not follow the sketch. See my earlier post for commentary on that change.

Inspiration's lineage: the discipline of play

To many teachers, this picture might well represent the ideal student that they have never before seen. Eager, empty and knowing it, friendly, waiting to be filled with knowledge. HAHAHAHA. Dream on teacher friends!

The figure in the painting represents a muse and the conceptual problem with it is the same as the basic conceptual problem with many folks notion of education. The muse has appeared at a light source, removed the top of his head, and is indicating to the unknown source to "Fill 'er up!" Presumably, the muse will the travel to artists and musicians etc  in need of inspiration.  Then the muse will pour off a bit of inspiration into their heads....

But the world really doesn't work this way nor does education. Getting inspired, getting an idea, and getting educated are not passive activities.  They require preparation and effort, though the spark may come at a moment when the prep has paused.....   You have to have been entertaining various notions for a new one to pop into your head.  Reading or looking or thinking or writing or painting or playing generally happens first, usually on a regular basis. So this is another way of saying that inspiration is often the result of that boring old thing: discipline, even if it is a discipline of regular mental play.....  (hmm some irony there)

ABOUT THE PAINTING: This painting of mine is an oil on canvas which went to Cape Coral Florida with Sharon and Jim Houston many years ago,  I don't know where they are now, or if some hurricane has destroyed the canvas or if they sold it in some weekend garage sale.  Or if they are even still alive or have moved to god knows what state. I was known as Misti in those days, and that is how I signed this painting. This picture was scanned in from an old snap-shot.

-- M.M. (Mar) Walker

Weep for the Dead

On this 4th of July weekend - that celebrates the birthday of a nation who's present government violently pursues its agenda at the expense of ethics, decency and common sense  - I offer this oil pastel/watercolor called Weep for the Dead.

We have taken our freedom and our equality and turned it into a crass, egotistical culture that values Blackwater, Halliburton and their like and lets the poor drown in a flood. That believes valor can be bought.

We are like the British empire of old, we are in decline. Selah.

New painting underway

It's based on this drawing:

12 by 12 inch, oil painting on a deep cradled masonite panel - sitting here on the mantel. It's from a 2000 sketch that I hadn't yet painted... It's isn't finished and in fact - I bought the panel Tuesday after I mailed my taxes. Poor woman needs a face, the tree needs some leaves etc etc. I am thinking of calling it "Bad Date" or maybe "three fences" or "Witness" or "The Blue Dress" I have to wait and see how it looks when it's done (which could be quite different) The original sketch for the painting at the right, was much more ominous than this currently appears - but there are more layers to add. At the same time I am working on a second painting - which is wild and non-objective.

One thing I like about art - I don't have to wait for 20 people to do it with, or the approval of some perfectionist director / producer / conductor, etc., or of the reigning stars. I don't even have to worry about the kevetching of an audience while or immediately after I am performing. I don't need to perfectly follow a script or score written by someone else, nor do I have to listen to complaints about how awful I am, or intimations that I am not musical. If I make a mistake in paint, I can study it, and fix it, as oils, can be changed and tweaked. I can paint in my room without ever showing it to anyone. It can be a private world. Or I can post it here and reject disparaging or irrelevant comments. Do I sound a little defensive? I have a sore throat on one side and my tinnitus is really loud today. (And was Wednesday night too, when I was just awful.)