studio notes @ www.markhorststudio.com

turning embrace no. 7

2012-01-27T21:18:00.002-06:00

oil on canvas. 24" x 24". 2012

let painting be suggestive

2012-01-27T21:16:00.002-06:00

"I do not believe that art should be explicit. It should be suggestive and ambiguous so the viewer has to enter in.”

Balcomb Greene

let the picture lead you

2011-12-27T20:05:00.004-06:00

Helen Frankenthaler, December 12, 1928 – December 27, 2011

Speaking of pictorial choices, Ms. Frankenthaler said that her decision-making process was wholly unregimented. ''There is no 'always,' '' she said. ''No formula. There are no rules. Let the picture lead you where it must go.''

Graham Nickson on pictoral space

2011-11-21T21:58:00.001-06:00

Notes from a New York Studio School drawing marathon in 2008. I find Graham Nickson's way of thinking about space to be so helpful. Here is a tidbit from one of the daily crits:

Let’s focus on 2 drawings: both treat the figure as part ofa landscape; one’s an urban landscape, one's a pastoral--but we're traveling over the form, traveling with thecharcoal, the charcoal becoming one with the experience of traveling.

Notice the dialogue between surface space and the geometryof depth. Here [referring to the drawings] we travel more slowing through the drawing because wehave to swim through the water before we get to a solid object. She’s thinking about space.

Here we have strong surface geometry, but here shape is notdescribing form. The form is not held firmly by the space around it, not conceived by the pressure around it

Make the space hold the form!

Don’t let the deepspace lead you out of the drawing! If you invite your friend to dinner and they come in thefront door and walk out the back door—you won’t be satisfied with the evening. You want them to walk around, look around, sit down, rest,eat, talk.

So in the drawing you want deep space to bounce us back. Cezanne always taps us on the shoulder and reminds us thatthis is a drawing. He brings us back to the pictorial space so we don’t leave by the back door.

Here the shapes call us through the space; whereas here westay on the surface. Dark marks have to keep their position in space. In other words don’t let them go into galactic space—thesedark marks make a hole

Here we’re getting a crowdedspace, but not a relational space.

Narcissus redeemed

2011-10-18T14:05:00.003-05:00

"Narcissus redeemed" oil on linen, 24" x 48" 2011

What would Narcissus look like if he were to stop staring at his own reflection? Most of us confirmed narcissists--among whom I count myself--might find our way out of the narcissistic trap by beginning to acknowledge the people around us.

Antonio Machado--the Spanish poet--suggest that narcissists might ask another person a question and then listen to the answer:
To talk with someone,
ask a question first,
then -- listen.

So here is Narcissus beginning to think about maybe acknowledging the one who walks beside him and perhaps ask him a question.

thank you Steve Jobs...

2011-10-05T21:34:00.002-05:00

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

from Steve Job's commencement address at Stanford University

Looking Into A Face

2011-09-23T17:46:00.003-05:00

This is the poem from which R. Bly took the title for his collection, "The Light Around the Body." It's called, "Looking Into A Face."

Conversation brings us so close! Opening
The surfs of the body,
Bringing fish up near the sun,
And stiffening the backbones of the sea!

I have wandered in a face, for hours,
Passing through dark fires.
I have risen to a body
Not yet born,
Existing like a light around the body,
Through which the body moves like a sliding moon.

light around the body

2011-09-23T17:38:00.002-05:00

I've been using the title "light around the body" for a new series of paintings. I stole this title from a book by Robert Bly published in the early seventies. The book begins with a quotation from the German mystic Jacob Boehme:

O dear children, look in what a dungeon we are lying, in what lodging we are, for we have ben captured by the spirit of the outward world; it is our life, for it nourishes and brings us up, it rules in our marrow and bones, in our flesh and blood, it has made our flesh earthly, and now death has us.

I love this idea of the "flesh" being made "earthly" because it implies that the human body is capable of something more than that. It's as if "flesh" is not necessarily in opposition to "spirit;" as if only this "dungeon" view sees flesh as "earthly." (Interesting, isn't it, that this "dungeon" view is now regarded as the "religious" one?)

2011-06-06T16:44:00.001-05:00

Alice 6.6.2011

Alice 9.18.2011

the bosque

2011-05-22T15:33:00.001-05:00

I've been trying to paint some of what I see along the bosque trail near our house. The colors are much more subtle than the typical New Mexican landscape painting might suggest. Here are a couple of attempts...

Jung and the value of images

2011-05-22T15:26:00.000-05:00

notes from my Sunday read:

C. G. Jung particularly was more open to aspects of world culture and its precedents, and his theory of archetypal images, as a kind of visual archeology of the mind, is a very powerful model with important implications for the practice of art.

[the money quote:]

Especially relevant is the notion, a basic component of ancient culture, that images have transformative powers within the individual self, that art can articulate a kind of healing or growth or completion process, in short that it is a branch of knowledge, epistemology in the deepest sense, and not just an aesthetic practice."

from "Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House," Bill Viola

growing wings

2011-05-22T15:12:00.004-05:00

Gregory Palamas and the body

2011-05-22T15:10:00.001-05:00

notes from my Sunday read:

"Again and again Gregory Palamas celebrates man (sic). Like many [eastern theologians] he believed the human body to be a divine image, a simulacrum of divinity. "The name of [humanity] is not given separately to the body and the soul," he wrote, "but to both together, for together, they have been created in the image of God."

"I suspect that Gregory Palamas and William Blake would have agreed on many things. Blake preached that the only way to the spirit was through the body, and regarded it with as much reverence as the soul because the body is part of the soul. "Man (sic) has no body apart from his soul," Blake wrote, "for that called body is part of the soul discerned by the five senses, the chief inlets of soul in this age." And again: "If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite."

from "The Holy Fire," Robert Payne

resisting the intelligence, almost

2011-02-17T16:31:00.000-06:00

Wallace Stevens said, "poetry must resist the intelligence almost successfully." What does that mean? Maybe it means that a poem is more than a collection of images that can be translated into something we might call "the meaning of the poem."

I would like to say something like that about painting: that a painting must resist the intelligence--the urge to explain the image--and that it must do this "almost" (but maybe not completely) "successfully".

So a painting might allow for any number of "explanations." It might invite the intelligence in and then present it with many puzzles.

you walk out

2011-01-24T20:48:00.002-06:00

"When you're in the studio painting, there are a lot of people in there with you - your teachers, friends, painters from history, critics... and one by one if you're really painting, they walk out. And if you're really painting YOU walk out." — Philip Guston

pitcher with pears

2010-12-17T19:50:00.002-06:00

12" x 16", oil on canvas, 2010

Graham Nickson on Cezanne

2010-11-24T22:07:00.003-06:00

"For Cezanne the tension of forms colliding in space is what the universe is about. He’s discovered how negative space puts pressure on the positive shape. Form and space is about the tension between forms. Think of it like a blueberry sitting in a bowl of yogurt. The yogurt holds the blueberry in place and because of the yogurt, it’s more volumetric." [from my notes at the NYSS Marathon, winter 2008]

JMJ no.4

2010-11-22T22:01:00.001-06:00

forget everything

2010-11-09T17:21:00.000-06:00

An account of Chardin's conversion:

"One of the first things he did was a rabbit. This object may seem of slight importance; but the manner in which he wanted to do it made it a serious study. He wanted to depict it with the greatest truthfulness in all respects, but at the same time tastefully, with no overtones of servitude that might make its execution dry and cold.

He had never attempted to paint fur before. He realized that he should not paint it hair by hair, or reproduce it in detail. 'Here is an object which I must aim to reproduce', he said to himself. 'In order to concentrate on reproducing it faithfully I must forget everything I have seen, and even forget the way such objects have been treated by others. I must place it at such a distance that I cannot see the details. I must work at representing the general mass as accurately as possible, the shades and colors, the contours, the effects of light and shade.'"

from, "Chardin: The Unknowing Subversive?" by Pierre Rosenberg

check this out!

2010-11-01T23:01:00.000-05:00

Vivante--the painter's blog

the wrinkled old woman and some words from Robert Bly

2010-10-29T18:46:00.003-05:00

“My main thought is that we, being so worldly, so informed, so flooded with motifs from the past, find it more and more difficult to allow any object, whether a snowstorm or a toad or a painting, to… reach the soul.

“The job of the writer [or the painter!] …is to give us a frog or a giant or a snowstorm and to protect it from all the invisible forces that want to delay it, elaborate it, relate it to correct opinions, prevent it from arriving at the soul…

…we recognize that Rembrandt is able to bring the wrinkled face of an old woman right up to our soul.”

Robert Bly from his introduction to “The Best American Poetry 1999”

brothers no. 3

2010-10-21T12:03:00.001-05:00

brothers no. 3, originally uploaded by Mark Horst.

strategies for wrecking paintings no. 3

2010-10-08T15:41:00.002-05:00

There are lots of ways to keep a painting from getting overly teachy. Mediocre painting tries to say too much, leaves no room for the eye to move. And so when I see the teacher getting the upper hand as a painting is developing I think about doing something bad.

Francis Bacon used to throw paint at his paintings, just to see how something completely accidental might improve things. I prefer painting outside the lines: letting the brush have some freedom, letting it dance around the canvas. That beautiful green on the door frame is also right up there next to eye brow and there under the chin. Why not. Here's a painting where the brush did it's dance:

Here's a painting by Ann Gale--who paintings remind me of the french painter, Giacometti:

too much beauty

2010-10-08T15:20:00.017-05:00

This week I've been soaking up a benediction from Mary Oliver:

When loneliness comes stalking, go onto the fields, consider
the orderliness of the world. Notice

something you have never noticed before,

like the tambourine sound of the snow-cricket

whose pale green body is no longer than your thumb.

Stare hard at the hummingbird, in the summer rain,

shaking the water-sparks from its wings.

Let grief be your sister, she will whether or no.

Rise up from the stump of sorrow, and be green also,

like the diligent leaves.

A lifetime isn’t long enough for the beauty of this world

and the responsibilities of your life.

Scatter your flowers over the graves, and walk away.

Be good-natured and untidy in your exuberance.

In the glare of your mind, be modest.

And beholden to what is tactile, and thrilling.

Live with the beetle and the wind.

Mary Oliver

excerpted from “flare"

I love the idea of being "green" like the "diligent leaves" and "untidy" in exuberance. Tidiness does take the edge off exuberance, doesn't it?

But what really hits me here, right now, is the idea that:
"A lifetime isn’t long enough for the beauty of this world AND the responsibilities of your life."
Life's responsibilities will muscle pretty much everything else out of their way--if you give them too much attention. I've done that for long enough.

a great calamity

2010-09-30T11:20:00.000-05:00

"It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions."

my studio @ the factory on fifth

2010-09-14T21:41:00.002-05:00

strategies for wrecking paintings no. 2

2010-09-11T14:29:00.005-05:00

Of course I don't really mean "wrecking" them. I mean what Susan Sontag refers to when she says that "scrofulous, tarnished, stained, cracked, faded [photographs] still look good; do often look better." I want the painted surface to reflect something of the experience of it's making--it's time. I want to subvert the illusion of representation even as I struggle with all my abilities to render an accurate, well measured and proportioned image.

So here's another way I wreck my paintings: I take a flexible rubber-like scraper and draw it through the painting to get unexpected and sometimes interesting patterns and blending of colors. I usually can't work up the nerve to do this until I've decided the painting is a complete and utter disaster. Then I can cut loose and scrape away. Here are two examples of that--the first a smaller 12" x 16" canvas and the second a larger 30" x 40" work:

strategies for wrecking paintings...

2010-09-10T16:15:00.008-05:00

As a painter I have so many strategies for "tarnishing" the image on the canvas. I find nothing more tedious that a painting that leaves nothing for the eye to do. It's like a child pounding on the piano keys, as if getting all the notes were the only challenge to making music.

So I routinely wreck my paintings in order to save them from a worse fate. I spread turpentine on them, I scrape them, I rub them, I brush them--sometimes I throw things at them. They're almost always better as a result.

Here's one of my current favorite strategies which simply involves taking a dry brush and raking the wet paint. Gerhard Richter does this all the time and puts the results in the Museum of Modern Art.

Here's something from Richter:

people

2010-09-10T16:08:00.003-05:00

"It is when people are at peace, content, full, that they are most likely to meet my expectation, selfish, no doubt, that they be a generous, joyous, even entertaining experience for me. I believe people exist to be enjoyed, much as a restful or engaging view might be. As the ocean or drifting clouds might be. Or as if they were the human equivalent of melons, mangoes or any other kind of attractive, seductive fruit.

When I am in the presence of other human beings I want to revel in their creative and intellectual fullness, their uninhibited social warmth. I want their precious human radiance to wrap me in light. I do not want fear or war or starvation or bodily mutilation to steal both my pleasure in them and their own birthright.

Everything I would like other people to be for me, I want to be for them."

Alice Walker

figurative artist slide show

2010-08-30T16:28:00.002-05:00

thinking about painting and the ruined image

2010-08-18T19:04:00.003-05:00

"Photographs, when they get scrofulous, tarnished, stained, cracked, faded still look good; do often look better. (In this, as in other ways, photography resembles architecture, whose works are subject to the same inexorable promotion through the passage of time; many buildings, and not only the Parthenon, probably look better as ruins.)"

from Susan Sontag, "On Photography"

your brother's blood

2010-03-17T14:49:00.001-05:00

your brother’s blood:

an exhibition of new paintings by Mark Horst

March 1—April 30 at the Stillwater Public Library

opening reception: Saturday, March 13, 2:00—4:00 PM

artist’s statement:

Cain killed Abel: murderer and victim. The resentful one; the howling, complaining one; the gifted one; the rejected one; the haunted one. Cain killed Abel, but it was Abel’s blood that cried in the field. Once that happened they were joined forever—brothers. Am I my brother’s keeper? Which brother needs keeping? These paintings hold a space for us to look at ourselves.

I hope the same is true for the mother-child portraits; the portrait of my father; the portrait of a young couple; the seated figures.

For me, the human figure has an evocative energy which may be why I paint the figure more than anything else. The face, the hands, the arms and legs have their own kind of narrative; their own sense of push and pull; of familiarity and otherness.

My portraits attempt to capture this ambivalence—the recognizable features of an individual on the one hand and the skittish, wild soul on the other; the qualities which we recognize in the figure and the light around the body which we often do not.

2009-10-07T12:14:00.001-05:00

, originally uploaded by Mark Horst.

what does a painting know?

2009-10-03T09:30:00.000-05:00

The visual image carries a strange intelligence. It can speak to us in ways that both deepen and undermine other ways of knowing.

Sometimes this is not at all the case. One reason we disparage art for being “illustrational” is that it is possible to eviscerate this deep work of the visual and harness it like a painted pony to someone else’s cart. Then the work tells us what we already think we know: no more.

But this strange intelligence has it’s own clever power: the visual can also take an image or a narrative and drag it place it never intended to go. Caravaggio’s prostitute saints and rent boy angels say something that the theologians only dreamed of.

What if representational, narrative painting could find it’s feet again, not as illustration, but, as a means of dragging the reluctant soul into a place ripped open by lightening and smoldering in grief? What if the visual image commanded the narrative like an insane dominatrix so that the old stories hauled some unseen strength out of the darkness?

What of Cain and Abel? What gift does Cain bring to the Divine No? What does he see in his brother’s election except some distorted reflection of his own wound? Who would be the keeper for that? What does Abel’s blood say to this man?

Are the wings of Icarus just another reminder that rising up will lead to no good and that we'd all be better off keeping our feet on the ground? Is that what Pieter Bruegel wants us to know? Maybe Icarus’ flight points to the inevitability of this golden, flighty, puer energy—and the need to rise up in order to escape from the prison of life's every-day-ness? What if these images say that flying becomes it's own prison and falling brings its own freedom. What if we grow our wings on the way down?

your brother's blood

2009-09-26T11:47:00.001-05:00

your brother's blood, originally uploaded by Mark Horst.

progress of a portrait. day 2

2009-07-18T18:36:00.000-05:00

progress of a portrait. July 16, 2009

2009-07-16T18:39:00.000-05:00

work in progress

2009-07-16T18:35:00.003-05:00

this clumsy living...

2009-07-14T15:02:00.001-05:00

So many camels kneel to take their burdens,
what choice do we have but to go down?

The salmon has to weave through so many waters
before she can return to her old home.

So many stammerers labor to speak one word.

from a poem by Robert Bly

wings of the morning

2009-07-02T11:21:00.002-05:00

If I take the wings of the morning,
and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea;
Even there shall thy hand lead me,
and thy right hand shall hold me.

Psalm 139: 9-10 KJV

fragile wings

2009-06-30T19:32:00.003-05:00

The wings we have are so fragile
they can break from just
one word, or
a glance void
of love.

I wanted to live in the cloister of light's silence
because, is it not true, the heart
is so fragile and shy.

Catherine of Siena
translated by Daniel Ladinsky

study for icarus series

2009-06-17T16:39:00.002-05:00

study for icarus series, originally uploaded by Mark Horst.

Is the story of Icarus just another way of reminding us that rising up will lead to no good and that we'd all be better off keeping our heads down and our feet on the ground? Is that what Pieter Bruegel wants us to know?

Maybe the story points to the inevitability of this golden, flighty, puer energy--and the need to rise up in order to escape from the prison of life's every-day-ness? What if the story says that this flying becomes it's own trap and that falling is also a kind of freedom. What if this falling and death is how life begins?

j.l with hand on soulder

2009-06-17T16:17:00.002-05:00

j.l with hand on soulder, originally uploaded by Mark Horst.

There is something here that speaks into me: is it the sense of being bound and working for freedom and motion; the sense of being in shadow and emerging into light; the sense of struggle, of wrestling, of searching, of finding; is there a question held in this image about the difficulty of being in the world? whatever it is, I can't get enough of it. If I could eat this drawing I would swallow it in one gulp.

jewel-like beauty

2009-05-04T12:17:00.000-05:00

Any Chance Meeting

In every gathering, in any chance
meeting on the street, there is a

shine, an elegance rising up. Today
I recognized that that jewel-like

beauty is the presence, our loving
confusion, the glow in which watery

clay gets brighter than fire, the
one we call the Friend. I begged,

“Is there a way into you, a ladder?”
“Your head is the ladder. Bring

it down under your feet.” The mind,
this globe of awareness, is a starry

universe that when you push off from
it with our foot, a thousand new

roads become clear, as you yourself do
at dawn, sailing through the light.

Rumi

that wildness of heart

2009-05-03T13:29:00.000-05:00

“He was a reasonable man and he believed that there was love in his heart.
There was not. Nor does God whisper through the trees. His voice is not to be mistaken. When men hear it they fall to their knees and their souls are riven and they cry out to Him and there is no fear in them but only that wildness of heart that springs from such longing and they cry out to stay his presence for they know at once that while godless men may live well enough in their exile those to whom he has spoken can contemplate no life without Him but only darkness and despair…”

from "The Crossing"
Cormac McCarthy

lovett children. first state

2009-05-02T22:15:00.001-05:00

lovett children. first state, originally uploaded by Mark Horst.

I'm working on this portrait... I like the lightness in it--and the gesture of the children. There are some areas to clarify, even though I plan to keep it more suggestive than polished.

looking in no. 3

2009-04-29T19:28:00.001-05:00

looking in no.3, originally uploaded by Mark Horst.

piling everything on an altar

2009-04-29T19:25:00.000-05:00

“To see God everywhere is to see Him nowhere. We go from day today, one day much like the next, and then on a certain day all unannounced we come upon a man or we see this man who is perhaps already known to us and is a man like all men but who makes a certain gesture of himself that is like the piling of one’s goods upon an altar and in this gesture we recognize that which is buried in our hearts and is never truly lost to us nor ever can be and it is this moment, you see. This same moment. It is this which we long for and are afraid to seek and which alone can save us.”

from The Crossing
Cormac McCarthy

nourishment like light

2009-04-28T15:32:00.000-05:00

from Rumi
(Sheikh Sarraze comes in from the wilderness)

…There is nourishment like
bread that feeds one part

of your life and nourishment like light for another. There
are many rules about restraint

with the former, but only one rule for the latter, Never be
satisfied. Eat and drink

the soul substance, as a wick does with the oil it soaks in.
Give light to the company.

journeys still to be ours

2009-04-23T11:02:00.004-05:00

A group of us were painting in Pepin, Wisconsin last weekend at Barbara McIlrath's farm. I found this poem at Barb's. It's how I feel painting: "imagine! imagine! the long and wondrous journeys still to be ours." The poem is Mary Oliver's.

Last Night the Rain Spoke to Me

Last night
the rain
spoke to me
slowly, saying,

what joy
to come falling
out of the brisk cloud,
to be happy again

in a new way
on the earth!
That’s what it said
as it dropped,

smelling of iron,
and vanished
like a dream of the ocean
into the branches

and the grass below.
Then it was over.
The sky cleared.
I was standing

under a tree.
The tree was a tree
with happy leaves,
and I was myself,

and there were stars in the sky
that were also themselves
at the moment
at which moment

my right hand
was holding my left hand
which was holding the tree
which was filled with stars

and the soft rain—
imagine! imagine!
the long and wondrous journeys
still to be ours.

Mary Oliver

the light that I love

2009-04-16T10:00:00.002-05:00

It is a certain light that I love and melody and fragrance and embrace that I love when I love my God—a light, melody, fragrance, food, embrace of the God-within, where for my soul, that shines which space does not contain; that sounds which time does not sweep away; that is fragrant which the breeze does not dispel; and that tastes sweet which, fed upon, is not diminished...
Augustine of Hippo

how the light gets in

2009-04-15T11:48:00.001-05:00

how the light gets in, originally uploaded by Mark Horst.

24" x 24", oil on canvas, 2009.

how the light gets in

2009-04-15T11:45:00.000-05:00

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

Leonard Cohen

why paint?

2009-04-06T11:57:00.000-05:00

My painter friend, Katherine Treffinger, asked me to say something about this question for her blog: “What I am wondering is why do you as an artist show up in front of the canvas? How does just the act of creating art hold enough meaning for you to show up and what is that meaning?”

If there weren’t something that remains hidden from us much of the time, something precious and wild, I don’t suppose I would bother with painting.

I do love paint. I love the smell of the linseed oil and the raw colors squeezed from the tube. And I do love painting: standing before the easel; the open window of a fresh canvas; the first brush stroke of paint dripping and clear; the deliciousness of seeing shapes and patterns and shifts of value and intensity.

But for me painting is—above all—a way of being present. It is the daily practice of paying attention with enough intensity that when the hidden world steps closer, I have a chance of noticing it; so that when the wolf stops to sniff the air outside my window, I can catch a glimpse of her.

looking in no. 3

2009-03-25T22:38:00.001-05:00

looking in no. 3, originally uploaded by Mark Horst.

I'm working on a series of head studies--with a goal of painting one each day for the month.

where to look for advice...

2009-03-13T14:36:00.000-05:00

…expectations based on the work itself are the most useful tool the artist possesses. What you need to know about the next piece is contained in the last piece. The place to learn about your materials is in the last use of your materials. The place to learn about your execution is in your execution. The best information about what you love is in your last contact with what you love. Put simply, your work is your guide: a complete, comprehensive, limitless reference book on your work. There is no other such book, and it is yours alone. it functions this way for no one else. Your finger prints are all over your work, and you alone know how they got there. Your work tells you about your working methods, your discipline, your strengths and weaknesses, your habitual gestures, your willingness to embrace.

The lessons you are meant to learn are in your work. To see them, you need only look at the work clearly—without judgment, without need or fear, without wishes or hopes. Without emotional expectations. Ask your work what it needs, not what you need. Then set aside your fears and listen, the way a good parent listens to a child.

from Art and Fear, David Bayles & Ted Orland

looking in no. 1

2009-03-13T12:48:00.001-05:00

looking in no. 1, originally uploaded by Mark Horst.

learning freedom

2009-03-13T12:43:00.000-05:00

The way of love is not a subtle argument.
The door there is devastation.
Birds make great sky circles of their freedom.
How do they learn it?
They fall, and in falling, they’re given wings.
Rumi

wakeup!

2009-03-13T12:41:00.000-05:00

I am a hole in a flute that the Christ’s breath moves through. Listen to the music.
Hafiz

I love Jesus who said to us:
‘Heaven and earth will pass away. When heaven and earth have passed away my word will remain.’
What was your word, Jesus? Love? Affection? Forgiveness?
All your words were one word: Wakeup.
Antonio Machado

duende and paint

2009-03-13T12:39:00.001-05:00

Everything with black tones has duende and there is no truth greater… These black tones are mystery itself whose roots are held fast in the mulch we all know and ignore, but where we arrive at all that is substantial in art. [Black tones are a] mysterious power which everyone feels but which no philosopher can explain.

So then duende is a power not a method. The duende is not in the singers throat, the duende rises inside from the soles of one’s feet—it is not a question of ability but of possessing an authentic living style… it is in short the spirit of the earth.

The arrival of duende always presupposes a radical transformation on every plane. It produces a feeling of totally unedited freshness. It bears the quality of a newly crafted rose, of a miracle that produces an almost religious enthusiasm.

from Lorca's—The Havana Lectures—on duende

wildness

2009-03-13T12:24:00.000-05:00

I know I love the day.
The sun on the mountain, the Pacific
shiny and accomplishing itself in breakers.
But I know I live half alive in this world,
Half my life belongs to the wild darkness.
Galway Kinnell

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade.
Roethke

the marks of wildness are:
a love of nature—especially silence…
a voice box free to say spontaneous things…
an exuberance…
a love of the edge…
Robert Bly

sunrise of wonder

2009-02-18T21:24:00.001-06:00

" At the back of our brains, so to speak, there was a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life was to dig for this submerged sunrise of wonder ." G. K. Chesterton

j.l with hand on knee

2009-02-18T21:15:00.001-06:00

j.l with hand on knee, originally uploaded by Mark Horst.

j.l with hand on soulder

2009-02-18T21:14:00.001-06:00

j.l with hand on soulder, originally uploaded by Mark Horst.

from Mary Oliver's essay, "of power and time"

2009-02-07T12:34:00.003-06:00

It is six A.M., and I am working. I am absent-minded, reckless, heedless of social obligations, etc. It is as it must be. The tire goes flat, the tooth falls out, there will be a hundred meals without mustard. The poem gets written. I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I have no shame. Neither do I have guilt. My responsibility is not to the ordinary, or the timely. It does not include mustard, or teeth. it does not extend to the lost button, or the beans in the pot. My loyalty is to the inner vision, whenever and howsoever it may arrive. If I have a meeting with you at three o'clock, rejoice if I am late. Rejoice even more if I do not arrive at all.

There is no other way work of artistic worth can be done. And the occasional success, to the striver, is worth everything. The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.

Mary Oliver's "a poet's voice"

2009-02-07T12:25:00.002-06:00

Also, for the poet as well as anyone else, each day in the private realm is filled with its mundane details, its noise, its flutterings, its passions, amusements, trips to the grocery store, to the amll for socks, to the car wash, to the all game. Such activities however are surface activities--the curl up and the breakage of waves. And poems do not come from that part of the ocean; they come from the dark and heavy and portentous and almost impenetrable depths. this is where the poem erupts and begins to shape itself. It is also the place where the poem matters, where it is read--for this place exists in every human mind whether one is a writer or not. Each one of us, in our lives, opens to this deep place at moments of ceremony, of crisis, of passage, and of transcendence, a moments of terror and at moments of great joy. It is where some understanding of our lives is sought, even if it is not always found.

two women in the wind

2009-01-06T00:06:00.001-06:00

two women in the wind, originally uploaded by Mark Horst.

embracing the world

2009-01-05T23:15:00.000-06:00

from The Brother's Karamozov

In the sixth week in Lent, my brother, who was never strong and had a tendency to consumption, was taken ill. It was a late Easter, and the days were bright, fine, and full of fragrance. I remember he used to cough all night and sleep badly, but in the morning he dressed and tried to sit up in an arm-chair.

That's how I remember him sitting, sweet and gentle, smiling, his face bright and joyous, in spite of his illness. A marvelous change passed over him, his spirit seemed transformed. The old nurse would come in and say, "Let me light the lamp before the holy image, my dear." And once he would not have allowed it and would have blown it out.

"Light it, light it, dear, I was a wretch to have prevented you doing it. You are praying when you light the lamp, and I am praying when I rejoice seeing you. So we are praying to the same God."

Those words seemed strange to us, and mother would go to her room and weep, but when she went in to him she wiped her eyes and looked cheerful. "Mother, don't weep, darling," he would say, "I've long to live yet, long to rejoice with you, and life is glad and joyful."

"Ah, dear boy, how can you talk of joy when you lie feverish at night, coughing as though you would tear yourself to pieces."

"Don't cry, mother," he would answer, "life is paradise, and we are all in paradise, but we won't see it; if we would, we should have heaven on earth the next day."

Everyone wondered at his words, he spoke so strangely and positively; we were all touched and wept. Friends came to see us. "Dear ones," he would say to them, "what have I done that you should love me so, how can you love anyone like me, and how was it I did not know, I did not appreciate it before?"

When the servants came in to him he would say continually, "Dear, kind people, why are you doing so much for me, do I deserve to be waited on? If it were God's will for me to live, I would wait on you, for all men should wait on one another."

Mother shook her head as she listened. "My darling, it's your illness makes you talk like that."

"Mother darling," he would say, "there must be servants and masters, but if so I will be the servant of my servants, the same as they are to me. And another thing, mother, every one of us has sinned against all men, and I more than any."

Mother positively smiled at that, smiled through her tears. "Why, how could you have sinned against all men, more than all? Robbers and murderers have done that, but what sin have you committed yet, that you hold yourself more guilty than all?"

"Mother, little heart of mine," he said (he had begun using such strange caressing words at that time), "little heart of mine, my joy, believe me, everyone is really responsible to all men for all men and for everything. I don't know how to explain it to you, but I feel it is so, painfully even. And how is it we went on then living, getting angry and not knowing?"

So he would get up every day, more and more sweet and joyous and full of love. When the doctor, an old German called Eisenschmidt, came:

"Well, doctor, have I another day in this world?" he would ask, joking.

"You'll live many days yet," the doctor would answer, "and months and years too."

"Months and years!" he would exclaim. "Why reckon the days? One day is enough for a man to know all happiness. My dear ones, why do we quarrel, try to outshine each other and keep grudges against each other? Let's go straight into the garden, walk and play there, love, appreciate, and kiss each other, and glorify life."

"Your son cannot last long," the doctor told my mother, as she accompanied him the door. "The disease is affecting his brain."

The windows of his room looked out into the garden, and our garden was a shady one, with old trees in it which were coming into bud. The first birds of spring were flitting in the branches, chirruping and singing at the windows. And looking at them and admiring them, he began suddenly begging their forgiveness too: "Birds of heaven, happy birds, forgive me, for I have sinned against you too." None of us could understand that at the time, but he shed tears of joy. "Yes," he said, "there was such a glory of God all about me: birds, trees, meadows, sky; only I lived in shame and dishonored it all and did not notice the beauty and glory."

"You take too many sins on yourself," mother used to say, weeping.

"Mother, darling, it's for joy, not for grief I am crying. Though I can't explain it to you, I like to humble myself before them, for I don't know how to love them enough. If I have sinned against everyone, yet all forgive me, too, and that's heaven. Am I not in heaven now?"

And there was a great deal more I don't remember. I remember I went once into his room when there was no one else there. It was a bright evening, the sun was setting, and the whole room was lighted up. He beckoned me, and I went up to him. He put his hands on my shoulders and looked into my face tenderly, lovingly; he said nothing for a minute, only looked at me like that.

"Well," he said, "run and play now, enjoy life for me too."

I went out then and ran to play. And many times in my life afterwards I remembered even with tears how he told me to enjoy life for him too. There were many other marvelous and beautiful sayings of his, though we did not understand them at the time. He died the third week after Easter. He was fully conscious though he could not talk; up to his last hour he did not change. He looked happy, his eyes beamed and sought us, he smiled at us, beckoned us. There was a great deal of talk even in the town about his death. I was impressed by all this at the time, but not too much so, though I cried a good deal at his funeral. I was young then, a child, but a lasting impression, a hidden feeling of it all, remained in my heart, ready to rise up and respond when the time came.