I had a solid topic in mind, and I may very well make it there. For now though my monkey mind jumping from branch to branch is doing just that. You see I’m what is referred to as a senior citizen, screw that, I’m old. Some would say “you’re not old”. Chronologically they’re absolutely right, still old enough to collect a government pension. Although the meds that keep me sane and alive tack several years on to my clock.
Making art as I age squeezes the flow. On occasion I thumb through my inventory, most from a few decades ago and wow the flow of letting go, and others with intense concentration, sigh. Neither seem to be easily at hand anymore, yet I keep plugging away. Not that I’m unhappy with the results, at least most of the time. I’m not sure whether I should chalk it up to a more pensive approach as age and pills play with my mind, or I’m being too impatient as I try to find that child who didn’t think about it but conjured every vision I have accumulated and as in meditation just let it go. I believe I’ve compartmentalized my creative life and like a library I have to go through the stacks to find what I’m looking for and not let it go but let it drain out of me.
Because I don’t have a studio to make the oil paintings that make me feel like a child playing in the mud with a teaspoon of discipline watercolors have become my mode of being. Not that I object to them, but there is an element of frustration with achieving what I set out to do. I’ve even painted a sunset, something I swore I would never do. There are only two I have ever seen that have any merit. Many belong screwed to a motel wall (see below). The two are Sunset Over A Lake by J.M.W. Turner, and Sunset Over The Port Of Le Havre by Claude Monet.
My usual modus operandi is to work in series. Grab a subject and hold onto it something I worked at for years with isolation in my studio. With watercolours, made on my living room table, my monkey mind takes over. They’re here there and everywhere, series be damned. I gotta catch that damn monkey or settle and say this is where I am and it’s ok. Perhaps the monkey some day will sit at my side.