Edges

Today the beach was flat and pristine. Receding waves left salt edges - overlapping, entwining and rubbing out each other as they flowed back into the bay. Nothing else, only a scuffed gull print here, a pearly stone there.
It all reminded of drawings I made a couple of years ago, where I discovered that it was the spaces in between things, everything that interested me – the shadow, the light, the energy – not any thing itself. Mystery and aura and potential at the edges where we (they) lurk for not belonging.
It's all wrong, this gray of graphite, I mean the color is wrong. But the experience of drawing it is right. What is colored graphite?

Experiment, experience

Today I find myself making this drawing I didn't know I would make, or even like... Yesterday I discovered something that worked in the skeleton drawing – conflicting directions that I usually intuitively avoid. But it worked, in a way I couldn't see before. So, the next thing I know it's creeping into other drawings. Is it workin', not workin', I dunno.
Hal is back home from hiking in Colorado, conquering great high altitudes and being changed by the experience. The mountain is in him now (Mount Elbert), from his feet through his calves and thighs and body and into his heart.
I'm thinking about how experience shapes us. My experience of being home this time, looking within; his of being out on the mountain top, looking within.

Boo!

All this week I have been making Halloween drawings, well, illustrations. And also working at my day job - which is really a night job - which meant that there has been precious little time left over for yard work or ink drawings.

So, this morning the experience of working on skeletons and ghosts in Adobe Illustrator is hereby recorded with ballpoint pen on paper, above. It is the disjointed (pun intended) fragmented quality that reflects pretty accurately what's in my head right now... I need to keep working on this piece, but am off again to work. Sigh.
And, I'm including a couple of the Halloween pieces just for fun.

Cycling

Fall continues to claim small living things, drying and scattering seed. We've had so little rain here, the process seems accelerated – too soon and too fast. I am resigned.

Night sky

Here it is after all.

Laundromat drawing

Today was such a good day. I finished a huge project that had taken up most of the summer. Delivered the CD and brushed myself off. Took a nap, grilled salmon for dinner, drew this picture while the laundry was cookin'. I thought it was about a nighttime sky... but then it sort of erupted.

Rabbit with its head ripped off

I'm reading that massive biography of Georgia O'Keeffe, A Life, by Roxana Robinson. Can you tell?
And I'm thinking that I've been born into the wrong generation, way way too late. The ideas that preoccupy me, the quest for something more substantial in my world, the desire to simplify and let go of materialism, the need to find a place in the world not separate from all other existence, the insistence on spirit and meaning in art ... I find that it all was defined by, oh, about 1912 (Kandinsky, Dow etc.).
Have I never had an original idea? Have I never made work that hasn't been made before? Bah.
I am just another artist seeking meaning and balance in the physical world by looking inward. We need it now as they needed it in 1912. Georgia worked hard, says Robinson, to finally find her own way, her own voice in response.
Where is my way? Where is yours?

Resist/accept

Deathing or birthing? Pulling away from life or just growing into it. Ganglia drying up and forgetting or root system reaching deeper into the earth.
Summer is winding down and I see changes in the landscape, every living thing seems to turn inward: drying, conserving, introspective. Wait, it can't be over. I'm not ready, I haven't ________ (fill in the blank).

Ouch

Worked this image and then worked it again, trying for that fine edge... existence and tension and balance without anything ponderous or weighty. Humor and sex are just bonus.

Air and distance

Looking into a small physical world. No, wait, a really huge expanding physical world puts air and distance between us.
I have a friend who, on seeing 'What the Bleep do We Know?', was taken by the idea that we – everything – are made up mostly of space. Lots of space even within the pieces that make up the tiniest atom. My sister commented that we, as we age and the universe pushes out and away while we do so, are left to ourselves... Is youth a time for connections, in biological, social and whatever ways? And middle age for introspection, stillness, clarity? I'm OK with that, as long as we don't get too cranky or needy.
I was experimenting with cropping this drawing in a severe way – coming down from the top to blot out the sky was claustrophobic; up from the bottom was sort of threatening too, exposed and vulnerable. In the end I left it. Edges lifted by a slight humorous breeze.

Labor Day weekend

Upstate New York over the weekend: meditating in my sister's garden beside the creek. Sunlight filtered through trees, flies buzzing in my ears. Breathe deeply. All my drawings seem to be about aging, time and how living things cycle through... leaves already turning, insects rushing through their short lives to mate and die. Inevitable seasons. Pick the last tomato off the vine.