maplife in progress

Map life, life in scraps, maps torn and then the snake oil solution, the answer to all issues---more paint, more lines, more strokes:
(more later)

Same Face, different eyes and time

From the lenses of different friends come other portraits backing down through the years:

Blame it on Bronzino

I rarely draw in pencil but after seeing the Bronzino show at the Met some urge took over me. Having no other body at hand I dragged out the mirror and did the portrait stare with myself.

Waking Up

Here in the palm of February I can taste the whip of late March and the cruel incoming kiss of April. Somehow I'm waking up before the snows have blown off my cave ledge. Whatever mechanism drives the body's perambulations about the globe is giving notes to the backseat driver in my mind. There is a flurry of wings, a scent of color, and the uncurling of heart, unmindful of joints, injuries, or any calendar-including the Mayan. I say to hell with the apocalypse, lets get on with the morning sacrifice and burn myself down to the sooty nub and walk away.

Movement IV--negative space

The long drawn intake of air beneath Shaun White, the huge expanse of vertical white around Lindsey Vonn, the slip-slide of shifting apertures among the speed skaters, the cut & swirl of shapes made by the figure skaters and then the meeting & parting of space between the pairs. I was once told that chemical engineering is sometimes called The Cotillion of the Molecules. Here in this ecstatic ballroom of frenzied, nut-jobbed, beautiful and generous humans is a dance that cracks my heart.

The Oldest Thirst

Inspired by a Rumi poem

Movement III-Valentines in NYC

So day of the inscribed heart, chocolate and pissed off guys I go with a friend to see the new Bollywood movie My Name is Khan. The theater is a surf of Hindi voices. The movie is over-the-top, brilliant in places, ridiculous in others but, for myself, wonderfully satisfying. Off through the night we go to a Chinese restaurant where they speak Mandarin and serve a fantastic fish swimming in a red sea of peppers. Chinese New Years is revving up--its the first day and the place is full and hen gao xing (very happy). We get burnt by the peppers and discover that its year 4 thousand and something. Its also Year of the Metal Tiger. Fueled by peppers and wine we zigzag out into the night and down into a bar with candles in blue glass, ladies with quick eyes wearing very high heels, and a soft, dreamy darkness.
I'm full of arrows shot straight from the bow of the city itself into the drawn heart on my sleeve.
祝 你们 新 年 快乐！

Movement II--Short Track

Like a ghost of a thought Apolo Ohno slips through the field of skaters, leaning so far that his body almost kisses the ice, as his gold fingertips dance across the white. The sheer fluidity coupled with blink-speed decisions, a lost moment and two skaters dissolve into the slipstream.
It makes me happy to consider making a more beautiful painting, pouring everything I know into a field of brush strokes...
...the movement of their bodies draw perfect lines across my eyes, across my heart and erase time

Movement

This morning, before coffee, I found myself watching Bollywood dance sequences and the car chase in Bullitt. The delight of movement. The pause, the flurry, the growling mustang, the rotating wrist & hip, and then the roar of acceleration & the down stamp of feet on winged tilt of torso and eyes. Shiva dances everywhere, even in the heart of the machine.

Paint a Bunny, Kill a Bunny

Brain Twist

Today, sitting in my doctor's office, I was reading Russell's The Problems of Philosophy. My doctor is Chinese and the office is in Chinatown. The predominant language in the office is Mandarin. Now I study Mandarin, so occasionally I'll catch a phrase, word or familiar sound. Imagine reading about the nature of reality (in English) while being submerged in a sea of language that you only peripherally understand. I am just beginning to grasp that everything might only exist in our minds as sense data when they call the woman next to me. She is asleep so I lightly nudge her. She gets up but forgets her file. I pick it up and hand it to her saying" Ni de..." (meaning "Yours..."). She takes it and says "Xie xie ni" (thank you). I go back to reading about that damn table.