"Her Imagination Tends to Run Wild" - oil on cradled wood panel,  16 x 16 x 1.5 inches  (click on the image to purchase)

Continuing an exploration of Seaton's Fiddleheads: 
​
Once when you hurt me I slept at a Red Roof Inn. I double-locked the door and tried to
watch talk shows to keep my mind off sounds like someone suffocating someone
in the next room. I thought I saw blood on the box spring and imagined needles and bulgy
veins, there’s something odd, I thought, about someone whose imagination runs this wild.

-FROM FIDDLEHEADS BY MAUREEN SEATON

Seaton's words are visceral and uncensored, off-putting.

She invites us to look at things we might not otherwise care to - especially those things that run through our own minds during challenging times.   

Visual art can be like poetry in that way, making us feel squirmy and uncomfortable because we feel stuff when we look at it.  I suppose that is part of our jobs as creatives - to invent a way to look at a thing that allows us to approach and sit with it for a moment.  Long enough for an aha, perhaps.  Or even just an oh.

"In the Shimmering Black Soup" oil on paper, 20 x 20 inches.  (click on the image to purchase)

Continuing an exploration of the poem Fiddleheads:

I think I’ll come back to life now. It’s odd to think of something so big we could miss
the elephant we’re living on, like this planet Earth, is she alive and we’re her brain cells,

each one of us flickering, going out, coming back to life? Even Chicago looks poignant
from the top of the Hancock, organized and sincere. Think if we were photographing

Earth, how dear she would be, how we’d watch her shimmer in the shimmering black soup
of the firmament, how alone she’d look and how we’d long to protect her, the way it feels

​

to protect a woman at the height of orgasm, the liquid giving, the seawater slide of coming
back to life. When you hurt me, I evolved like a backboned sea creature, translucent
​
nervous system sparking along in the meanest deep where I was small enough to not care
and my passions ran to swimming, gulping, spitting bubbles back into new oceans.

- FROM FIDDLEHEADS BY MAUREEN SEATON

Seaton's poem takes us on a ride, sliding into the worst of things, the deepest ocean, the blackest soup and yet leaves us shimmering and sparking, resilient and curious and compassionate.

"Esme, Self-Liberated"  - oil on gallery wrapped canvas, 16 x 20 x 1.5  inches.   Ready to hang.   (click on the image to purchase)


​I release you, my beautiful and terrible fear.  I release you.
​
You were my beloved and hated twin, but now, I don’t see you as myself.

- FROM FEAR...I GIVE YOU BACK  BY JOY HARJO

Fear.  It can be a motivator, an instigator, an investigator.  It keeps us safe - warns of danger.  But it is also sneaky and takes us hostage, holds us back from growing, learning, leaping, bravely conquering.  It can become the tentacles that bind us; hold us imprisoned.  It can cloud our perception and obscure the truth of things.

And once in a great while, fear can create an infinite loop, making it very difficult to step out of it.  Fear of fear​, which results in anxiety, panic and panic attacks.  It would be funny if it weren't so awful, being afraid of something and then being afraid of the very act of, well,  being afraid of that something.  Maddening! Frustrating! Illogical!  The human brain is both a wonder and a ponder.

So the thing about fear is that you can't dodge it.  You have to look it squarely in the eye, like a bully, or a honey badger (more on that in a future post).  And when you look at it, you're really looking at yourself, or rather a part of yourself.

"The Conversation We Never Had" - oil on cradled wood panel, 18 x 18 x 1.5 inches.  Ready to hang. (click on the image to purchase)

If you've ever replayed a conversation over and over in your head and thought about all of the possible ways it could have gone, then you've experienced jouska. "It's this idea of rehearsing or playing out this hypothetical conversation. And in a sense, getting a feeling of control, or ownership over something that of course, is beyond our control,"  - CHRISTOPHER LELE 

Oh-ho!  Yes indeed.  I am the queen of conversational re-play.  And Lele's words hit me right in the gut - it is all about trying to control what I cannot.

​Conversations are the ultimate improvisation - they are in the moment, ad-lib, free-wheeling spontaneity with all the risks of embarrassment, regret, rejection and self-judgment that goes along with improvising.  But they are also, then, the opportunity to create genius moments on the spot, build your confidence muscles and create a seamless groove between the brain, the mouth and the other human, along with building authentic connection.  Some part of me believes if I experience enough jouska, I will be better at conversations in real life.  That is not how it works.

It's great to know exactly who you are, warts and all.

But it is a whole other thing to let someone else see you in all your unfiltered glory.  And there are some folks who do that so very well that it looks, well, elegant.  I aspire to such effortless grace. For now, I am an awkward, wart-laden bumbler.

Just look at this sentence in the quote - ​I know I'm a horrifying murderbot.  What if I created some I know sentences?

I know I am a snotty soggy bog creature filled with tears.
​
I know I am a hand-wringing worry monster with an overactive amygdala.

I know I am myopic and often only see the blurred shapes of things both literal and figurative - blind and bumbling without tools.

It makes me nervous writing these sentences.  But also they are kind of funny, because just as Murderbot isn't really a bad seed, neither am I quite as warty as my inner critic says.    Just when I thought a murderbot had nothing more to teach me.  Hmmmmm.

A good portion of painting is correcting where we messed up.   Contemplating such countermeasures keeps me awake at night.

My partner and I have this conversation often - his medium is often digital, while mine is paint, paint, paint.  He will lift layers of his art and go back to a previous version in the event of a mess up.  Which may provide a whole lot more incentive to experiment, as well as the temptation to become lost in a never-ending list of options.  But this also requires a huge amount of experience and willingness to excavate your own creation. And patience.  And the ability to "see" the layers (which are many).

The lengths humans may go to in order to avoid looking directly at  bad (or uncomfortable) things are extraordinary. 

The scaffolding of denial (or avoidance) can be intricate and challenging to surmount.  Deeply ingrained, sometimes it's hard to see what is scaffolding and what is just a habit of self-protection.

If you're like me, even the preceding sentences can make you squirm a little.  Um, ew.  No thanks, not going there.  But, since ​artists are here to disturb the peace, as the meme says, let's keep going.

This piece, inspired by several AI bot images interpreting an emotive cyborg, immediately grabbed my big red button and said DANGER, WILL ROBINSON!  Because I am quite sure there are some things my brain wants to build intricate structures around.  And also, how does an AI bot know what "emotive" looks like? 

Ultimately, as I attempt to do in my own life, I incorporated the event into the subject's own person and looked for the strength and resiliency (and, in the case of wings, freedom) that may come from having faced something and lived a life beyond it.

The Watts quote landed after the painting was completed, and gave me a fresh view of the piece independent of Leda's mythology.  She is transformed.  

​And once again the process of creating leaves me with goosebumps and gladness. :)

We're going diving into AI today.  How can we use it as a constructive tool?

It turns out the AI bot can be a pretty good art critique group.  It is willing to point you in a direction without apology or beating around the bush.  And then it will point you in a new direction without apologizing for the first one.  Ha ha!

Let's dive!

​​For the initial painting, I began with a photo from one of our forest wanders, and asked the AI bot to give me an abstracted landscape interpretation of it.  After wading through a few dozen images, I found one I liked pretty well and painted a version of it.

​I​t hung in the studio for a month - I looked at it in every light and just shrugged.  Ho hum, I thought.  I wanted something more abstracted, more textured and gritty.  Normally I would just attack it with paint, but I decided to ask the AI bot - what now?  And told it "textured, gritty, abstracted".  After a few dozen suggestions, it came up with this:   (grid lines added with PicSplit)

​Thoughts:  seeing the various versions suggested by the AI bot helped me really see what was working, what was not, and what could work much better - along with what would not work better, because the bot's suggestions can be kitschy and overly commercial looking sometimes.

I then attacked my original piece with paint.

Adding some grid lines to keep things organized, then blocking in the darks based on the revised composition.  

​Thoughts: the bot kept the composition fairly similar in the suggestions, which made transforming this piece pretty simple.  This helped me see how some minor adjustments could really make a good painting, without starting again from scratch.

The revised inspiration image was much softer, so most of my time was spent softening everything with layers of thinned paint, rubber wedges, brushes, paper towels and fingers.  Ghost images left behind from the original painting add depth and interest to the background.  Adding paint, then removing some to reveal hints of the past.

Thoughts:  the shapes suggested in the revised image were much simpler.  It was easier to see where things in the original painting had become fussy as I worked at whittling away many of the small shapes.

The suggested color pop was tricky - it appeared to lay upon the painting in parts, and was a part of the scene in others.  This took a few layers, with the final one added with brisk passes of a laden rubber wedge - resisting the urge to blend that final layer in.

After that, refining some of the shapes, adding warmth to the sky and texture with chopsticks and paint, dripping paint and flicks of a paper towel.

Thoughts: the final revised piece tics all of the boxes I was hoping for in the first piece. Things I should have known from experience (simpler shapes, softer transitions, hints and suggestions instead of obvious forms) were much easier to recognize when viewing a dozen variations of the original painting. 

AI causes many of us to wince, cringe, shrink, fear, feel disheartened (its product can be very, very good). For artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers, game designers and so many other professions, it can feel overwhelming.  As with most new technology, I tend to try it and see if it fits anywhere in the toolbox.  

What are your thoughts on AI as a creative tool?  Leave a comment below.  One (or more) lucky commenter will be selected at random to win an original piece of art!

This painting has been sitting here for months, waiting for its story to be revealed.  And it came to me on the first cold, rainy day in a good long while, sipping coffee in the studio and listening to the soft sound of water.   Thanks to Hosseini, I have the scaffolding to deconstruct it.

I became what I am today at the age of ten, on a rainy day in Alabama in 1972.  I remember the moment as if I were standing there now, my dad asking me out on the patio of our townhouse to have a talk, through the sliding door and onto the cement pad which had no furniture or adornment.  It was the day I was tasked with finding and confiscating my mother's many hidden bottles, and, in a sense, I am still looking today.

There is a lot of information about how art helps the viewer, allowing access to emotions through a visual catalyst which may help reveal questions or truths which are otherwise hard to reach.  But really, art heals the artist.

It heals by reaching in and pulling out the guts of things - letting the creator examine them  from safe perches.  It heals by being slow to reveal - teasing, tickling, suggesting, nudging before dropping the veil.  And it heals by allowing the artist to speak about the art as if it isn't their own innards in the paint.  A little distance from the subject allowing the act of vulnerability to feel less unclothed.

Thank you, dear reader, for listening.  Have you had a revealing art experience?  I'd love to hear your story.