Bird in A Boat

On the prow of a small boat in the middle of a wild sea… a tern pauses for rest. The empty boat is an island for his thoughts to occupy while the elements swirl around him.  

The wind gusts and rushes with no apparent reason or pattern. The clouds and mist fly across the white sky.

Above it all, the imaginative moon stalls transfixed yet untethered.

The empty boat, once so full of ambiguous promises still seems to wait. Wait for what? Terns fly from pole to pole and from sunrise to sunrise. The bird is always fatigued and always ready to go.

The Tern gathers strength and solace imagining that this moon, even, this benevolent and sly orb, sends a few beams (of uncertain vintage) his way and dimly lights his gay and urgent flight.

This painting is from my sketchbook. It was finished on June 4th. I lump it into my series of paintings and drawings about Owl and Tern.

Unfinished Business

When is a painting finished?

When all the lines are colored in?

When all your colors are used up?

At 5 o'clock?

It's finished when it's ready to be finished!

Some are like restless, pesky zombies: they wander about and are just never settled. I guess a picture is finished when it has said something and added a bit of punctuation at the end of it all. It's never left hanging. There may be questions (the good kind that tell us something about ourselves). But never is the question: Is it finished?

Meet a few of my zombies:

Just playing around with paint… like playing with your food as a kid

This one actually did get finished but I had to turn the paper upside down to get some traction.

Where once there was a white expanse, now there is a sand dune and the sea. Then what happened? Indeed!

It's an illustration because there's text and an image on the page (not that they are in any way related!

The curse of decoration! Maybe things can exist just so the world can have a little more beauty and intrigue in it. 

the collage area at the bottom is nice but other than that…?

still working on this one. Always searching!

I think this picture wants something more or something else… all the birds wandering around without purpose. Sometimes, just that simple realization is all it takes and it's "finished." Doesn't Art drive you mad!

Being Nature

Often the most realistic painting has a chaotic foundation. A healthy dialogue between these two states is common in many forms of art past and present. You see it in Persian miniatures and Jackson Pollack; in Eadweard Muybridge and Carl Andre.

Why just paint Nature

when what you really need to get back to experiencing

is being Nature?