When asked what it is to make monumental work, I didn’t ever see myself making this in scale perhaps the way painters make huge work as Chuck Close. I recall several interviews where in his early works how it was shut down his aim to do what he was doing. My aim was never to make monumental works. It may have come from necessity for survival of the art itself. This is a challenging time in my life where mentors like Close and Loren White are no longer with us.
When people pass, emotions run high temperament. Sensitivity within myself I can at my best of endurance I can not contain. Those of us who do this work, duty within my hands, there are days I can not find it in myself to do anything but sharpen my knives and adzes. Two days mixing a green that I know I know how to do can challenge me and I would turn the pallet upside down after 5hrs that went nowhere.
Wondering what is next for me to do as these pillars thin, if not for my love of my land and words of my father, go to your name. Walking among the towering giants of buildings as a ‘staycation’ imagine myself a visitor in Summer night to be part of something and hear and experience what I would normally not be part of.
How I had forgotten what it is to part of unpredicable things and appreciate nuances of living. The work in my mind will always be where it is. At this moment in life knowing I need to appreciate the time of what is granted to me with random conversations of places I had explored enough to feel welcome to. I have friends that would joke about this kind of thing, but it is rare to let rest a mind so focused on something infinite, it’s fury becomes a finite.
Walking with a knowing of what is gone, my love beside me, hands in my pockets watching people who visit this place taking pictures of a sunset from 5th avenue, married or single. A need to see this day a reset within me.
Dying in such heat like a dried raisin, knowing a heat rising. October will be soon and in it my time to work hard. I look to that day as some dread as dreary, but in those times are where I am most productive. I drafted a long post about thanking George David based on his birthday that I didn’t judge correctly and I was corrected by his niece that I am in deep appreciation of.
I felt I should have made some grand gesture but all it had to be is be the city and take time and see the world with my love and my time in it. Look at the poles Duane Pasco made in pioneer square and see them in a different way from the time I was a young man. Place a feather from my pocket at the base of the Dzoonakwa and appreciate the time it to for it to be still standing.
Smile and not be angry, in this transformation. No ride can take place of what it is to be the journey I have been taken by ride. As she calls me away, I look back at what I’d saved and watch the breeze take it off in distance.
She tells me, let it be.
(Mister Blue Sky)
Reminded that work will be in my hands and as George David always pointed out time to stop and rest, be the time without tension. We spend all our days pushing and pulling with work a hard iron keep and we are not machines.
I was forest within the trees for a time. Deeply caught in a void until friends picked away parts of web to get me out of my own hurt. In balance of scale, admiration can be admiration for it’s own sake.
Holding hands in love where I can understand, the fingers of my own hands with grasp of my tools will always be my bind. I am those roots of known as she tells me, know you are not broken but root.
Monuments can be made but without substance they are nothing.
I have nothing left shaped by uncle George but a small piece of ivory. An idea I had in my mind that one day I would buy back a painting made by Art Thompson in some sense of resolve.
That uncharted piece of ivory that means nothing to anyone will become something as meaningful when the time is called for me to do so. Carving at such large scale as toll it takes my body, I long for moments to sketch and know over days passing, enduring to make purpose of small object that only belongs to me.
it’s by grace, this word has page to know it belongs.
The stars where you are interstellar, I have my hand in my pocket with harbilary batteries no nft
the ivory in my keep is substance.
As Loren said, not wood or glass, wood withers, glass breaks but ivory is keep.