moon(s)

Yesterday morning, coming out of a crazed dream with family and rescues and grenades and deceptions a burning, smoky thought -- my very first waking thought of 2007 -- slammed me from sleep into the woken world. I can't really describe how foreign, how other, how outside of me this hazy thought was. In the next minute or two as the fog cleared, distinct, well organized, poetic ideas with words surfaced as I scribbled them with my pencil, still laying in the bed. And still, the feeling of being handed something, of something passing through me rather than me creating or welling something up was intense. Today, as I consider who I've been reading of late, and what they have had to say, and what of their work has left impressions on me, I can see clear influences. But what I jotted in ragged script on a bedside sheet of paper, eyes half closed, is beyond parroting or simply rewording what I read before sleep.

It is a working definition of art and the charge of an artist that really works for me today.

Preface enough.

"The artist must study the surfaces of their subject and recreate them. In that observation they must come to see or understand some of what lies below those surfaces, those skins, and they must make that too -- as they paint the orange peel, the face -- they must paint what is always struggling to rise to the surface. Indeed, the real subject is that struggle and the real challenge is to understand and capture the essence of that movement, that rising, that clawing to crack the shell."

I got up and spent the next couple hours painting a piece I'm having trouble titling. The trouble grows out of my uncertainty of what I was making -- as I was making it and still now after I've finished work on it. I can't tell if I've made three skies on three nights with three moons or one sky with one moon simultaneously rising out of the horizon and moving from new moon to the slightest waxing crescent. Though I'd never imagined making a painting like this until yesterday morning laying in bed, all the elements of it have been striking to me of late or have haunted my thoughts for years. The crescent moon has cut me with its beauty and fragile whisper of what's coming soon the last few months. The part of the moon that we can sense and see as a lighter spot in the sky as the moon reveals the bright exposed reflected part of itself has fascinated me for as long as I've been staring at the sky. Like a bra behind a gauzy blouse. Like the wonder of the moons underneath that, even. Similarly, I've seen shocking sunsets lately -- I've caught a few minutes of several in the past two or three weeks that made me want to pull the car over. In each case the sun was gone completely beyond the horizon and the sky was evenly, cleanly orange and the fracture of the mountaintops close by -- the naked, wintertime line between our piece of earth here and all that sky there has been impressive long after the stars are blazing. I'm seeing the world beneath the leaves of all these forests and old hills this year in a way I couldn't last year. And after the sun is gone, and the moon (if there is one) is up, I've been noting for many years that you can still find the horizon line in the dark. Black night is a different shade than black earth. The mountains are darker, even on a cloudy night where the stars and moon are obscured. There is always light in the heavens so that we can see a difference between what we're tied and weighted to, and what we will rise into. Dim, but light undeniable. The contrast, the line, runs angry and jagged through the divided night sky.

I took 99 pictures during the course of making this pretty crude, raw painting that pleases me even for its lack of beauty. Michael, the father of the family I live downstairs from, was kind enough to burn all the photos on a disk after his wife, Debbi was kind enough to loan me her sweet digital camera to snap pictures with. Thanks y'all. Here are a few shots in chronological order of the making.