"...that beast

astray 

that finds neither home nor joy nor nourishment

                                                                   in a world that is strange and incomprehensible to him.” 


-Hermann Hesse

http://img38.imageshack.us/img38/4965/steppenwolf.jpg

Synthetic Insolence 

eke out that soft spot, watch from a careful distance, plot the remains of your existence.

Retreat, retreat to keep yourself safe. You feel the fingers at your throat and for the rest of your days you run andyourunandyourunand


you can't recover your life.

I'm not afraid of being dead.

 I'm just afraid of what you might have to go through to get there.

-Pamela Bone

Out to Pasture

http://img208.imageshack.us/img208/886/pasture.jpg

As long as you are useful, I will love you. 

If you provide for me, I will love you.

Here, take shelter in my (fickle) hands, they will protect you.

Yes, Eventually, I will discard you,

 but carefully,

 morally

(utilitarian bear)

and I won't look.

Irreconcilable Differences

“their heart grew cold
                 
                     they let their wings down”

― Sappho

http://img571.imageshack.us/img571/8825/irreconcilabledifferenc.jpg

In our enthrallment with ourselves, and in our satisfaction with our ability to manipulate that which we posit to love: we poison, erode, and destroy.

Sometimes the object of our affection hangs on, desperately hoping.

Sometimes we chain her, desperate ourselves.

and Sometimes

Sometimes... she packs up her hope in a neat little package and buries it next to her heart, before quietly walking away.

We are only falsehood...

...duplicity, 

               contradiction; 

                                we both conceal and disguise ourselves from ourselves.

-Blaise Pascal

Human:

http://imageshack.us/a/img689/7233/humanv.jpg

We are intimately connected with nature and yet, almost always, actively, consciously, disconnected. We need the natural world, for all our forms of sustenance, yet we destroy it. We enact great laws, wide-spread campaigns, clever slogans to show everyone just how much we care, then we go home turn on two televisions, crank the heat to 75, or the air to 60, leave every light in the house on and eat our dinner off a plastic plate delivered to our house in a plastic bag (in our plastic car).

In the painting the main character is tied to one of the horses, his tale wrapped 'round her finger. He struggles to leave, she restrains him, keeps him, though it is killing him. At the same time as she is killing this horse, she gently cupping an injured bird, and staring longingly into the night sky, thinking about the beautiful natural world.

We are not to be trusted, we humans.

-------------------------------------------------------------------

This entry is cheap, and will be short-lived. I am four (4!!) new pieces deep, and it's making me crazy. I NEED TO SHARE.

So tomorrow, or maybe the next day because I never met a deadline I liked, NEW, UNSEEN, artwork - holy fuck, i know. Shut your whore mouths. Goodnight. 

The Truth

The truth doesn't have to do with cruelty, 
                                the truth has to do with

                                   mercy. 

                                           -Ken Kesey

Go In Flames

http://img526.imageshack.us/img526/8516/goinflames.jpg

 Sometimes we are destroyed by the people that love us most. They take their loving hands, set aside their gentle hearts, and tear into us mercilessly.

 In agony we clutch our chests and scramble desperately for a foothold. Minds reeling, we beg for understanding, only to be met with answers that don't answer anything at all.

A horse

... is at least human, for God's sake.

-J.D. Salinger

Yeah? Did you get that? My son did not... and my soul bled everywhere when he admitted it. I sucked it in, smiled, explained;

"You see, " I said "the horse, in its raw, unbridled state" (and I chuckled internally at my cleverness here) "is often more relatable than.., well, than most people. Do you see?"

Blank, beautiful, but blank, blue eyes stared back. I sighed.

"nevermind, do you like it?"

and he did. I Christianed him a horse, for at least that moment.

Larger Image

“We are never so defenseless...

....against suffering as when we love.” 

― Sigmund Freud

...and so we don't. We divorce ourselves from our emotion, our community, our family, our humanity.

We insulate ourselves with violence and cruelty. We work carefully to cover our soft spots with an impervious layer of sarcasm, bandage our wounds with too-quick laughter and  endless self-derision. We hide our pain and hoard our pleasure, panem et circenses, forever and ever, Amen. 


Let this be the awkward introduction to my Humanity series. This is, in case it is not incredibly, painfully, obvious, my interpretation of the relationship between us, the keepers (of language and art) and them, the givers ( withoutwithoutwithout). 

My guts smeared about the canvas, piece 1:

Civil War 

Inspired by a map of the boundaries of the Civil War; where the yankees began, and where they ended. This is just one wife, below the Mason-Dixon line. She has lost everything. Everything but her convictions. Present, and Free.

...I'm not interested

in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.

-Mark Rothko


I'm sick of doing things in order. Just the thought explaining one more damn piece no longer in my current conscious is draining enough that I want a nap. So I'm not gonna. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This piece was, without out a doubt, the most emotionally challenging piece I have ever done. It is my boyfriend, Adam, as an infant, and his father, Ray.

http://imageshack.us/a/img502/1531/rayadam.jpg

I struggled with the lines, with the colour, with myself. I redrew, I repainted, I cried my heart out. Six attempts were made before this final version emerged.

Adam's dad passed away when he was 12. From everything I have heard, from the man that Adam is today; his goodness, grace, intelligence, creativity... Ray was an amazing man, and an even more amazing father. 

The moral, decent, solid person Ray was, contrasted so vividly with the ...lackluster version of men and fathers so prevalent today. The tragedy of it becomes so much more. 

Neither my words, nor my pencil, could ever do this relationship justice, but I will be forever grateful that it was. 

One word

“One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life:
That word is love.” 

― Sophocles

My leaving, in mind and body, hurt. It hurt me, it hurt my lover... it caused both he and I to question ...well, everything. Neither of us is particularly good at sharing our emotions, especially if they are painful ones. He was scared I wasn't coming back, and I was scared he would stop loving me, and neither of us was really talking about it.

I was working on this piece, didn't really know where I was going with it, when he texted me.

He texted me a poem, a beautiful poem... In it, he compares himself to an oak tree: solid, strong, and inherently rooted. Myself he likened to a bird: flighty and indecisive, but free. He invites me home, to him, in his tree. Together, our dichotomy creates a Symphony.

Eventually it will be okay...

...but eventually may never come.


I wish to preface this a bit:

I love my ...other half (words lack the depth I seek here).. more than.. ..shit. All the words (x∞ +1). My undoing was in spite of his valiant efforts, never, ever, a result of them.

Need

We had moved in together. Too soon, but there was little choice. I was without my son, my friends, and any shred of my personal space, was long gone. I was unbelievably alone and yet never by myself. There was no space, aside from my body, that was truly mine. 

Everything in my life, everything I loved and cared about, was ultimately under someone else's control. I am was a recovered cutter and bulimic/anorexic. Bulimia, anorexia, cutting are all about one thing: control. I perceived none, so I made some. 

I used that control to destroy what I hated, what kept letting me down, that which was filled with nothing but failure, Me. 

...............................

I hate this post. I hate this piece. 

I will hold on...

I told myself that I would post these in chronological order, from beginning to end... but.. but.. I'm feeling what I painted tonight so freaking hard, man.

Currently listening to Mumford & Sons, whom I love, especially this track - Thistles and Weeds...

My heart breaks at every line, every note. This song just wheedles its way into the chinks in my carefully constructed armor and reminds me of my inherent, and inevitable, weaknesses.

bah.

so, out of, or in, order?

“Memory is the diary we all carry about with us.”

-Oscar Wilde


The 'Lost' series, piece 2:

Caged Heart

My mother never wanted me. She pushed me out of her life, and out of her heart with the same kind of tightly controlled smile that you find among the popular high school girls and type-A, corporate-minded females. At some point, I ceased to be a real, feeling, human to her and became instead a conviction... an 18 year sentence. 

I throw myself at her headlong, whining piteously at her feet like some unwanted dog.  My heart... desperate for escape from loneliness, batters itself against the glass like some horribly caged bird.  

In these blogs I will attempt to explain, in words, the feelings I was having when I composed the piece. Composed? Constructed? Something...

I suppose it's best to begin at the beginning...

The 'Lost' series:

These pieces were brought to fruition in my mind in the early parts of the last year of my life. They made it onto paper in the last 7 months or so... They represent the losing of one's place in life.

Piece 1:

Wanderlust

 I kept moving, telling myself I desired the movement, felt a need to travel, explore new places, but I wasn't telling myself the truth.

I was alone, and lonelier than I had ever been. I had a place to live, but I was homeless. My heart hurt, I was estranged from my son, and my lover didn't seem to understand my pain. 

My attempts to interact with society were contrived, mediocre, and left me feeling drained. 

I wanted desperately to belong somewhere, feel needed and wanted, so I searched the maps, unfolded them in my mind and plotted the locations and hearts of everyone who ever claimed to give a shit. I contacted those I believed, those I held out real hope for. Set aside a room inside me; made the bed, fluffed the pillows and invited them in...

The new space reserved for my work

I will be posting my art here from now on... I hope you follow me, moreover, I hope my work brings something to you, to your life. Please, tell me how you feel, what you'd like to see, and *please* comment on what you find.

Come, 

 Grow with me.