Vincent and the Wolf

Here’s a timeless repost:

Some years ago, while I was writing An Artist Empowered, I asked Julia Cameron (author of The Artist’s Way) for her take on handling rejection (a thought that I could share with my readers), and all the other ‘garbage’ that might fall in your path.

She told me the following, which is worth reading and doing as often as necessary. My personal formula is this: Rejection becomes opportunity when ‘Why me?’ becomes ‘What next?’

Detour

You might believe that you are a free thinker, an independent voice in the din of inequity. You might be such a person. But before you completely congratulate yourself, to find depth, you must dig deep, brother.

While social conditioning may provide some benefits to society, artists most especially must strive for firsthand information. If not, the artist becomes a cog instead of a creator.

If there is any doubt that we are all subject to brainwashing, consider this: we are indoctrinated from birth to believe that we are members of different tribes and belief systems based on borders, rote, and parenthood: American, Russian, French, Catholic, to Jewish, Hindu, and so on.

See reality as it is, which is also art and the essence of Zen. While this is a simple task, no one said that it would be easy.

Gypsy in my Mother’s Soul

Adele, my mother, was a poet at heart.

She’s been gone nearly two years now, and she is never far from my heart and mind.

Janet Riehl, the gracious tour de force behind Riehl Life: Village Wisdom for the 21st Century, a social and cultural mecca, is featuring one of my mother’s poems on her website today.

You can read Adele’s poem here.

Improvisation 16

The great Russian-born artist Wassily Kandinsky is widely credited with making the world’s first truly abstract paintings. Picasso teetered on abstraction, but never went all the way. With a background in music, Kandinsky often titled his paintings as impressions, improvisations, and compositions.

Here are Kandinsky’s guidelines for experiencing art for your own self: “Lend your ears to music, open your eyes to painting, and stop thinking! Just ask yourself whether the work has enabled you to ‘walk about’ into a hitherto unknown world. If the answer is yes, what more do you want?”

I have always felt a strong kinship with Kandinsky. Enjoy my Improvisation 16. 

The other day, I was in a modern medical building. I sat down in the waiting room opposite a very large door, about the size of one of Mark Rothko’s famous color-field paintings.

The door resembled a Rothko painting in size—larger than life-size and enough space for you and friend to enter the mystery of the painting. There’s more. The various grades of randomly modulated horizontal shellacked colors that were applied by a tradesman, or maybe ever an automated door painting machine, also added to the illusion: the door was also clearly reminiscent in content of a Rothko color-field painting.

So, it is not unreasonable to see that should this office door be hung in the Museum of Modern Art, viewers would most likely accept it as art.

This, of course, begs the age-old question: Is it art because the artist says so? Or is it art because a number of influential people canonize it? The more important issue to my mind is this: Do you know? This is where the journey begins.