this summer

Now that it is cold and the rain strips the last memory of an overlong summer from the piscean brain, I find this: the path through my studio garden. Very similar to the fish's progress, it curves its way. In a winter garden there are no obvious luxuries, but here as in my brain there are endless moments of delicate details and colors rippling through their possiblities with the changing light. I think I'll put this one in my pocket and keep it as the grey light fills the volumes of NYC.

Heart of the Map

The studio is the heart of the artist's incountry. Here you are off the map of others, but in the sweetest spot of your own. The metaphors grow as lush as the garden that surrounds mine.
The path through the garden to the studio has always overlayed every fairytale and science fiction journey in my library. But the actual walking has a tactile resonance of its own physicality. In its domesticity it includes the wild of weird bugs, fantasitic birds and unending story buried in its greenery.
The walk to is part of the events that take place within.
I am not always there-being most of the time in NYC--where my studio is in the same room that I live, work, and eat. But there is still that resonance of heart in the wild when I get to the wall I paint on.

extreme memory

These are the fall colors of upstate New York--the halogen like illuminations of tree leaves framed and scribble over with the black trunks and branches of their fellows...often it is the contrasts of darks and extreme color that entrance me.
And here is my studio, stroked with the late sun, and guarded by the hydrangea's pinked blooms. To me the studio is a place of magic--its structure a host to possibilities and strange instructions. This one has a trapeze and many books, not to mention a ten foot high wall to paint on.
I've been reading Krakauer's Into the Wild. It was pressed on me by a friend, otherwise I probably would have ignored it, thinking it somewhere in the geography of Herzog's Grizzly Man. But it isn't.
I am reminded of a very young self ending up in a hospital in the Sahara in Algeria. Not enough salt--it can kill you. I was lucky--I only ran a 104 degree temperature for several days.
This was before the circus. And before martial arts.
I am reminded of that heedless drive and recklessness. A part of me misses it. The Mom part of me cringes at the thought of my son stepping into it, and yet I would be sad if he never spent time there.
So---I plunge the world into my eyes and drink deep...

garden in B & W

7 am is still dark. Almost 8 and the light is a blued grey. The summer is being pummeled into the streets by rain, which is straining to bring autumn into the peculiar state of this late October. The ink brush painting above is my garden upstate. The one I walk through on the way to my studio. It isn't an exact representation. The mimosa tree (or tartuffala tree as I call it) on the left is actually at least 20 feet tall--and the hummingbirds did hover there. The buddeleia bush with its attendent monarch-huge in the forground-is the singular stand-in for the many (pink-violet, white and coming next year: deep purple).
When I'd wander out there I would call for my cat, Ming, who would come bounding, dog-like to my side, and lift up his face and one paw to greet me.
So the rain delivers its summer memories as it dashes them to the asphalt.