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

2010: art shows R us

In the beginning of 2010 I wrote - "Let is be a year of music!"  Instead for me 2010 was a year of Art. It was the first time in decades I showed my artwork in a Gallery.

,First I showed  a drawing called Aspects of the Self one drawing at the Frieght Street Gallery during their May Day Festival show: This was an amazing thing. No one had seen my work, except digitally, in years!

Later in May I showed one of my polymer faces during the Artwell Rocks show in Torrington. I was on a roll whoohoo!   The work was called "The British Invasion: 40 Years Later."

During the summer, at the request of Victoria Munoz, I brought three works to hang at Freight Street during one of her poetry Salons there. I brought my Dancing Poems collage, Hair's on Fire (an oil pastel) and  Water & Fire, a digital painting.

For Artwell's Landscape and Still Life in Septemeber, I brought three works I had finished recently, all oil paintings on canvas board: Between the Darkness and the Deep, Rural Free Delivery, and River of Sky.

I created a special work for Artwell's DaDa show in November. New Era: the Eagle Egg Shell Breaks, and a found art peice  called congress which consisted of twisted spring wires from an old couch.  It's been a good year!

In honor of the eclipse: Moon Madness Strikes

In honor of the eclipse: This column appeared years and years ago in the Ridgefield Press, back when I was a reporter there .

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Moon Madness Strikes Reporter

by Mar Walker

Some Ridgfielders had a perfect view of last Sunday's lunar eclipse.

``Did you watch the eclipse?'' I kept asking friends expectantly.

``Too cold.''

``Too late at night.''

``Saw one last year.''

Like many other disinterested parties around town,  I've always figured the stars and the planets could carry on perfectly well without me. And what I had planned for this particular event was to skip the whole thing and stay in bed.

Fortunately I was awake at midnight. On impulse, I put on some shoes and threw a coat over my pajamas. I was curious I guess, and it seems I've been cheating myself all these years. It's like the Grand Canyon was right off the porch and I'd never even looked.

Out the back door I went at a little past midnight. There was a bite out of the full moon already, just a little nibble really. It was a perfect night, utterly clear. The bright moon washed the night sky to medium grey and crisscrossed the yard with shadows. Bare trees swayed in parallel. Black limbs juggled stars in leafless hands like fussy husbands rearranging Christmas lights.

And of course there was music - the brook out back, full from the day's rain, murmured on its way to the Norwalk River. Over the scuttling of leaves and over the wistful sweetness of wind chimes on the back porch, ever so slowly, the round silhouette of Earth stretched over the moon.

As moonlight dimmed, starlight and darkness heightened. I felt cold and alive, shifting weight from one foot to the other, craning my neck like some fat bird in a courtship dance as I stared straight up.

My cat wailed at the backdoor to come out and as I turned, momentarily facing further North, I saw two bright shooting stars, one right after the other. The very long, very bright trails streaked down and I imagined I could hear the sizzle of air as they fell.

A little numb now, I ran into the kitchen and put on water for tea. I wrapped a scarf around my neck and rummaged around for a pair of binoculars. Leaving the tea to steep I went back outside.

What a revelation - with the binoculars I could make out the dark spots on the crescent of moon still showing. I studied a pale smudge to the lower right of the moon and found a cluster of stars. I focused on stars and found where I thought I saw one or two, there were entire flocks of stars drowned out by ambient light.

Alone under such surprising immensity, many thoughts came. About the fear this ancient sky-dance had once inspired. Once, before there were electric lights and television, it must have been a natural thing for men and woman to study the night sky, feeling its beauty, dwarfed by its enormity.

Now we hold nightly vigils before the TV's glitzy banality - consumer culture flashing across an 22 inch screen. What a contrast in pacing and depth when compared to an eclipse.   Our attention span is jaded by 30 second commercials. Our awe is reserved for special effects.

Instead of stepping outside and experiencing nature firsthand, we watch the highlights, rebroadcast to us as we sit on comfortable couches in warm living rooms. I know that I myself am like that. Most people I know are too.

A sudden noise caught my attention as a bright light appeared moving quickly along from the direction of New York. In the binoculars, red and white lights flanked the slender shadow of a jet. As it drew closer, low in the sky, I could see the glow of its engines spewing eerie white smoke, twin rockets in the dark. The sky is amazing and despite our drawbacks, we and our technologies are amazing too.

At one thirty a.m., when the moon had dimmed to a glimmer, and my hands had grown numb holding the metal glasses, I went in and drank my mint tea and rubbed my neck. I found if I lay flat on the floor beneath the kitchen window, body stretched under the table, I could see the moon easily without having to twist my neck. Lying on linoleum, bathed in the emerging moon, I fell asleep.

Drawing with markers: An odd little sheep

Okay I admit this cross-eyed sheep is slightly silly, though it's fun. It's something I drew with markers when I was in college. Of course that was in the stone age!  HAHAHA, I used it recently on an All rights reserved notice on my Picasa web slideshows. More on that later.  

I think it represents me - sort of odd but colorful in a squirrelly kind of way! hahaha!  though these days I am no sheep to be herded. I am more the puzzled dragon, fire contained within, ready when the situation calls for it. Or a feckless flea - hopping around pointlessly. Depends on the day.

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.