Series Paintings

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New art, new portraits, poems, New Year images

The Wide Spot is a big empty space, littered with cigarette butts and beer cans  on the edge of downtown Petros, a gathering place for some of the more unusual suspects around town. Sometimes I go down and take photos and talk with those gathered. More often, I just listen. One my newest series of portraits takes these men and women as models. It’s called, appropriately, “The Wide Spot” and many of the paintings are accompanied by poems. I like the idea of working in two mediums, asking the image to feed the poem and the poem responding back to the  image. Here are a couple for the New Year:

Blue Sunglasses

If the world is not beautiful to you,

change its color.

Cheap sunglasses can do this sometimes.

They can make what is hard to look at

blue and beautiful.

They can make you forget Elvis is dead;

they can help you sing a happy version of “Blue Christmas”

even in the August heat.

They can make love feel present in lovers

that are full of need

but who pass like the crystals of frost in the spring sun.

We all reach for what can help us live day by day.

 

Like Achilles

Young men come to laugh

and to be around the edges of life

that they know more about

than they probably should.

They drive their four wheelers too fast

and most of the time without helmets.

They feel themselves invincible.

They are like Achilles

one moment before the arrow strikes his heel.

I suppose that is a kind of innocence.

Tragedy is always nearer than we think

because of most of the time

we refuse to consider it.

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Hello world!

This morning, in late 2009, as it is raining, I begin to pull paintings for this manifestation of Salt of the Earth: the Petros Portraits.  The pieces are drawn from four distinct series of works.  The first series are paintings which depict a large cross-section of the people who live in Petros; these paintings are all approximately thirty-two by forty-eight inches.  Secondly, one piece is from a larger formatted series called  Men at Work.  Thirdly, there are pieces from a series which I started last summer  depicting children and young adults.  Finally, there are pieces from an ink series that are concerned quite specifically with a gathering place in our town that is called the “Wide Spot.”

At this point, I must admit, that it is a hard thing for me to bring these works into the light because I know that these pieces are huge projections of myself, as well as the images of people I know.  If, in these works, I have not always been kind to them, I hope I at least have been true to something of who they are as individuals.  The works were, I believe, created in a true spirit of sympathy and empathy; we all, after all, sail toward that great departure that is hopefully a birth from darkness into light.

     I hope these faces will open as roads on which you may journey; I hope you will see in these faces the journeys that you yourself will be forced to make, that you yourself will choose to make.  If I believe anything right now at this moment in history, it is that we humans still must face the world fully and completely out of ourselves. We cannot do this without the journeys of our lives being written in a deep script on our faces.  Look then with an understanding that ours is a shared existence and that there is a bravery and a trust that goes into the making of these portraits.

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