Last night, after watching the game, I looked out my front door at Magic, then walked to the back of the house to see more. Moonshadows on the snow. Twins of tree branches on snow-covered ground, spread out like black spider-webs, searching with Sistine fingers, telling stories we’ll never truly understand. Yes, they talk, and talk, above ground, underneath it, across the globe, and they protect and defend. Each other. The natural world communicates a kind of practical, functional, oh so direct vision of love, while we scream (and worse) at our fellow humans over countless nothings.
Snow at midnight. Dark gray on white, with hints of dark blue, floating. Contrasts, impossible. Peace. Light where it can’t be. Light when it can’t exist.
Poets can hear this if they jettison all words — their bricks, their walls — and Listen. Painters can paint it when they stop, cast off their ego, their shields, and let the world wash over them. Musicians can utilize the most abstract of the arts, the one most akin to non-human speech, if they set aside all set-asides, and go back to a time before they were born. To the face they wore before that birth, before the time of the one who gives birth. And look on without it. When artists become non-human, when they Make Ten, they know. Translation.
More new paintings below. Getting more and more comfortable with the brush (pen), and switching between painting programs. Still not taking the easy way out, which those programs make possible. Still don’t feel it’s fair. I want the act of painting to remain, always, even though the screen has reduced the field of play. But I can’t help feeling, as mentioned before, how great it would be if I had a monstrously large screen, and could stand up, use the pen in the same physical way I once used a brush. Stand there, step back, use the brush here and there, step back again, and hours pass as if they were seconds, as if I were beyond time.
Moonshadows.
