cartilage sinew muscle & bone ii (unfinished)

A meditation on the unrefined. . . the sublime & the vulgar. Autumn. Picasso. Trails. Rome. The richness of the raw material-- the infinite of the unfinished. The majesty of the mad space-- the cathedral and the mind, each extending to gather space, vacancy, fullness, layers. . . psalms.

fifteen miles into autumn & the run was the work of feet clocking packed clay beneath low clouds, a cool gray day. . . the trail was bulge and recess, scarred by storms and stones and raincuts. the sky was flat, wide and vacant like cotton duck, ancient and flecked with birds. Sepia. Air was push and pull, kneading into the vocabularies of language and image, the legwork of a runner or a painter. the holism of the exertion pushed into a quietude, an alignment. craved a neatness of thought: a combing of mind. a unity and continuum. a process intact.

Autumn embraces harvest & death, is kerouac's roman candle, is blake's tiger, it is rimbaud's afrique and van gogh's absinthe. It is a burning, cherished thing. the old trees of the southern landscape newly stripped and bare: burnt umber bones that thrust from the ground like a child's alphabet. The wet smells of jagged granite in the blue ridge burn the breath, lapsing into gray. Stone & bone. Primeval. Autumn is the lure of the rabid vixens of les desmoilles d'avignon. Autumn is curse & promise. Autumn is wiccan and voluptuous and fleshy and lushlife. Autumn is promise and betrayel and the slip of the spring's veil to smoke and ash. Autumn is paradox and threshold.  smoke, stone and bone.

picasso's bulls, his hooves of ink working into bark and pine needle and dirt, images spun from picasso's “bootblack” paris years onward into the war oeuvre. . . saltimbanques et les paysages cubistes, les guitars ou le journ. . . les assemblages. . . bathers and cassagemas and the shades of blue and the late miles evoked my early inspirations: degas, van gogh, duchamp, cezanne, miro, rothko, rembrandt, de kooning, but picasso was the mark and the centrifuge. . . an enigma of a man infinitely reworking himself. Picasso was deeply modern: horrified by failure, suicide, poverty, sex, cellibacy, communism, guernica, women, stature, compromise. contrasting the depth of his horrors was his degree of self-love, unbound. but whether a tyrant or a gracious soloist, he was nonetheless a canon of modern creativity. Picasso was the carnivale of libido, (the carnivore of libido?), a fact emphasized by his longevity.  picasso and his bulls.

(motherwell's elegy to spanish republic series, probably a direct diatribe or praise of picasso, declares "i am the bull.  i am the picasso.  i am the knife of oedipus.")

Autumn is the potential of the raw and the unrefined, the kinetic contained within the inchoate. gesture and underpainting and stain and brief pours of dead leaves. Its the way a landscape can burn, ravaged, blaze, beautifully, raptured. And I was thinking about meola versus rostropovich or even dvorak. . . cellos and their bellow. . . i was thinking how schnabel was the archetypal 80's painter, filled with rage & ego and greed and a need for space. schnabel's canvas dwarfed even motherwell's larger canvases. . . (equally large was richter, scully, rauschenberg, rosenberg.) but schnabel's canvases were colossal and scale was the grandeur of the 80s art scene (a throwback to renaissance frescoes).  schnabel might be the contemporary picasso, the american version.

michelanglo's nonfinito sculptures-- the slave series, what donatello called the sculpturi nonfinito, a term vasari later adopted. . . referencing the waking slave, atlas slave, st matthew, et cetera.  the slaves contain the points of drills & chisels, of hard sanding, cross-hatching, chunks of coarse marble hammered to show the pock-marred stone of carrera. michelangelo preserved his birthplace in the stone, preserved his process, made the act part of the art.  the documented process became a natural inclusion, a visual history. The postmoderns evolve from this point of the high renaissance, the inclusion of self and the neurosis of that self, the constant movement of the self. . . constant breakdown and recycling towards wholeness.

elaborating momentarily on soutine, i had guilt that my previous impressions were processed, though i gave no images but only language associations. soutine, schnabel, picasso. . . their images remain distinct.  to write about visual art is an irreconcilable thing, to remove the innate by funneling into words words words => Processing.
endurance is the grandeur of idea no matter the mode of expression.  idea and its energy must remain prime and lucid, honest.  To include the Process.  To refuse processing.  its the trick.

laying brick or paint, cooking or running a trail, undisturbed by the barbs of existence while strobbing on the unrefined and arrowed towards a nondestination. . . yogis or shamans or poets or roman janitors. . . every act can be a transcendent act.  anything can become sacred. but the question is always there: What is the prime state of expression?

brunswick nature park & chaim soutine.

the salomon shoes (still wearing last winter's mud), some classic punk, the smoke of leaves, the chocolate woodiness of hot coffee. a sub-70 degree run is as comforting as a fall hoodie.

a cool tuesday and an electric familiar pushes the body through brunswick nature park. . . an immersion of the sounds of pine growth, a deflated basketball of a turtle dragging his shell, heady smells of the damp earth, sweep of yellow necked thrushes, squirrels bouncing branches, sounds of shoes crunching the gravel road towards the kayak launch where the trail crosses perpendicular, cut left, following the creek's tarry bank along the oldest trail of the park before turning into the jerky undulations of the woods. an old paper trail. blood pushes into legs and eyes and core. the words “Cartilage sinew muscle & bone” chant behind nature's seminar of acoustics. A trail run is a burning meditation that engages all the senses.

coolness brings an atmospheric redemption, a body's willingness to move, an innate yearning to stomp out miles on earth's variegated surfaces and the mind bending serious to the hymn of movement. Its an instinct in the new coolness to move and to try to move lithely, to burn the muscles with joy, kicking across storm debris in narrow slices of trail by the black water of town creek which sleeps like midnight quartz.

it is the cadence of crickets and the still drift of white waterlilies and the pungent smells of decay as hurricane irene still lays tangled on the trail and the slopes. the catch of spider webs and their constant disregard. sun & mosquitoes on shoulders. at a corner I shock into two large deer, one darts out in perfect sine movement while the other pauses, her head posed and her eyes black as the creek behind, and she too turns to spring away.

an old man and his dachsund roam the trails and he laughs at me “well i can see you have plenty of energy!” the dachsund runs with me for a few meters and he licks the air and turns back. i pause. the man tells how he kayaks with his dog (jack) at carolina beach and he has the gentleness of the lonely and the aged as he mocks his 72 years. i am torn between the run and his story and i later feel a guilt of not being more present to the him.

Cartilage sinew muscle & bone. the body burns its own fuels of an abstract fire. soutine and his redred landscapes of soppy paint, of mud mingling against a hill's contour with mangled trees and limping architecture. i think of the pastry cook's melancholy. . . his butchery paintings, his trout, his rustic tables with sparse ingredients. Wirey-boned rabbits splayed for an oiled pan. The pigments of carcass, rawanimalpaint, gravy paint. (butcher's paper for his drawings?) the blur of periphery is where soutine resides, in the elusive catch of redemption, the vapid glory of renaissance, in the breakdown of muscle on bone and the depiction of such a thing. unjudged, unhaunting. the detachment with which turner depicted london like a nocturnal explosion. . . nero's firey violin bow or whateverthefuck he played while rome was devastated. Cartilage sinew muscle and bone and not much more to the whole thing, to this architecture of breath and idea and movement and infinity. layers of the aleph. soutine was poor as dirt as a man but his soul (and his soul's palette) was a cathedral. 

the cadence of legs becomes the momentum of mind, and the running season is returning with 15k at brunswick nature park and life is good with the tapping of typing after a trail run in september. Lungs gasp at psalms and miles and autumn may be the one true palette of the year. Like soutine, like a run, like a lunge of lust, a burn of things primed and respiring into winter.

Rain band run.

Friday at 11am. Hurricane Irene flails and flays her first wild arms. Bands arrive hours before the storm's central churn and the frenzy of late preparation hits Wilmington. (While the anticipation of a storm is an exciting thing, the arrival of a storm can be baffling.)

Across the coastal region, whips of gray clouds spiral & march like burdened forms, layer like waxed, heavy brushstrokes, build into impasto smears of sky. Somewhere the voice of a weather anchor proclaims massive winds and flooding in serious, baritone enunciation. The rains are cold, stinging and pushing against my torso, opposing my work before relenting to a drizzle. My shorts stick to my thighs, my shoes are heavy with rain, my watch is confused by the beading rain.  The air is electric but cool and it is with half-belief that I watch the storm enter from southeast until it fills the sky, a directionless mass of movement, a swatch. 

The friday mid-distance run. . . A morning without compass; an act of habit.

A long run seems an unlikely thing as the garmin beeps into effect. The second mile follows the slow churn of legs as blood-heat pushes into the fold of a quad muscle. I note the birdless sky, the occasional boarded home, the deepening payne's gray of the horizon, the empty lawns, the tilting sway of the rain. A chill in the air.  The fourth mile is marked on the garmin with wild numbers tracking an erratic pace (gps signals rat-romp through clouds and weather, an unsteady register, thus data is jumpy). . . 6:12, 7:38, 7:27, 8:24. The park is empty except for two ladies casually pushing a stroller. I run spongy trails to a turn-around where my tailwind becomes a headwind. The wind shifts again from the east.  The effect is like swimming against a current; there is a total body force, a complete exertion.   As the mantra says, “Think with the whole body,” and running in a storm is a sure way to mindfulness. The band passes with a few gusts, a clearing forms, the air relaxes. My body finds an easy pace for the next three miles, appreciating the familiar terrain of the neighborhood.  The run ends with a walk around the block and my eager dog smelling the air as leaves confetti the air.   

A storm is a fierce thing when filtered through heavy rain, anticipation, news casts, the true unpredictability of Nature. Like a run, sometimes, you just work your way through a storm until it exhausts itself.  And you do so because it just what we do as animals, as people, as those who are alive. The mind, the body, the communion of the two, works with the same dynamics as the atmosphere and the earth.  Maybe it is no communion at all, but a reactionary symbiosis. A series of catalysts kissing off the fuel with flame.  A necessary rage.

work, a run, and auerbach.

a cycle of complacent meandering has come to an end and i've got to begin the work again. bend the back to the field with rough hacks, dull blades, stareoff against empty grounds (paper, canvas, wood). Vast fields, easy to get lost in, the labor of idea/image. . . millet. . . . . . so I am reading levine who was just announced as the new poet laureate and his work takes me right into the detroit guts of winter, the forlorn winter daze, jaundice street lights, the unromantic life of the american (auto) worker, the grime of floors and hands and grease, horns, a life stamped in shifts, petroleum eyes.  get this line:  "his blanket of newspaper rises in the breeze, a giant butterfly mottled with slaps of rain."  a real recession writer-- empathy to the worker in his detroit-eroded language.  poems that breathe like an assembly line.

luxury of thought.  images that explode into smoke, flash, vapid. “one day i'll paint in an armani suit.” ridiculous. this i wrote in an old journal, scribbled nine years ago, a copy of a nude bending off the margin, bookmarked by an excerpted manila page where i've inked an orchid, two tables' orders alongside the drawing. Server-artist. Artist-server.  shit. there is no luxury of thought any longer- just catalyst and response. the fleas of modern america, the fleas of minutiae.  probably should be a meaning, a poetry of things, a music perhaps, something beyond stasis.  the luxury of a whirl of thriving pigment and vitality. but recently i'm looking towards the impulse, the gesture: van gogh ink drawings (pure nature, holy nature, “i am whole in nature” he said), the fauves, kline, the canvases of baselitz, giacometti, the works of frank auerbach. 

i was thinking about Frank Auerbach while kicking six miles in the neighborhood, thinking of his name, the hard german “k” of bach, a hacking abrasion of sound, a mouthchop, a sound that is found in his work were one to experience synthesesia. his berlin roots, a jewish boy born in the thirties who got out of germany before the train got him (already had his parents, suffocated them with work, with deplorable conditions in a camp), the boy went to london, art school, became a gutlevel rabidass painter with the surface of his grounds sagging in the weight of paint and much of his work was shown flat so the paint wouldn't cave in, fall like thick clay plates to the floor of the gallery. Monochromatic panels move in textures that carve out the image, a forest thrusts through mudpaint to emerge out of a dozen or so final brushstrokes. the head portraits, something like a forest fire with eyes, a melancholy salmon/leek terrine gazing in 3/4 profile, or a girlish face infernal and pouring elan vital, ganked from some base impulse of perception, an emotive glance, the subconscious impression (a much darker, a more subjective place than the french impressionists' viewpoint), a picture dragged through a mire of mixed complementary colours to primordial tones, browns far from neutral, a process seemingly immediate but sought deliberately across hours and hours of posed seating. . . auerbach fully inspires me, engages me, invigorates me that he remains a powerful paint handler.  it is a good life when someone can paint over sixty years, tirelessly working for new brushmarks, tirelessly working with Paint. 

just a note to say that i am out of commission due to a back sprain or jam, some back injury.  the randomness of the pain baffles me, but i refuse the doctor trip.  i woke up with a sore back and then beat a full spinal-tweak across a downslope of a trail, a mis-step and a heel bash response, which is when an ache became an acutely painful area.  and while the lumbar pain improves drastically during the course of the day, the morning promises the agony again.  or it doesn't.  one never knows. so i am swimming and living offa advil and gelato, watching old bike films on youtube and below is a good one to watch if you get the spare time. the film is entitled "a sunday in hell" and it documents the paris-roubaix race (also known as the Hell of the North, hence the title of the film). the vintage machines are functional sculpture and the athletes remind me of hemingway's matadors. it is an engaging film.  meanwhile, thank you for checking in.

Injury Atopia Aporia Suk.

When uninjured, you never see an injury coming. when injured, you never see it passing. i'm living off advil, sweets, fish and chips, watching the tour de france by morning and sunday in hell by afternoon, and i'm craving an ease of motion which does not come. healing is an intrusive thing. jammed back grinds guts no matter what posture I contort towards. blah blah.  

meanwhile josef suk was a composer and string virtuosi from czechoslovakia whose music explored a wide range of emotional textures but the first few pieces I ever heard held that horror-vice of the war-era art, equal to the soviet composers of that time. i did not realize his recent death (early june?) but i heard an excerpt of a violin concerto today, sawing out some nice melodies which would then freefall into staccato reels of bitter whining & shrieking to build back the layers of a robust sonic boast. The tones moved fluidly, wholesome and moody. i remembered the box set of suk's chamber compositions, a local music store had it for months and i was always saving to purchase it. a yellow box accented by some design on the perimeter, his portrait in the center, a slavic grimace, wide face and stern eyes, the delicate carving of a violin's tune-keys by his cheeks. i never purchased it, buying instead gould's bach, bartok or mahler, paint or drink, but I can visualize the set now. parenthesised with stravinsky, shostakovich, schnittke, schumann. . . . the mad greats. put on some suk and pick up the red calvary stories of babel, some nabakov or chekov, (my wife would swear on dost's notes from the underground but you need a good translation), boil the coffee dark, add sugar and/or schnapps and you've got a fine winter ahead. Music makes struggle and suffering a savory thing.

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Lucian freud. Dead at the age of 88 years. Freud is a hero to me, equal to de Kooning. His handling of the nude, his choice of model, his torn upholstery couch and the piles of rags, a ragged cot, his impasto brushwork, the range of palette in a single painting, hell-- in a single leg! The definitive modern figurative artist-- conflicted, voracious, angry, horrified, disciplined, precise. Poetic. The lyrical forms of street sluts of london. Junkies with purple cocks. Royalty. Broken actors with their long torsos slumping in sleep. Blue limbs of weariness. Cold studio morning light. Interrogation light. A pale plant, a pale coat. The backyard of a london apartment house. Blue veins of a model harmonize with the blue veins of the hardwood floor.

A few years ago, the MoMA hosted a show of etchings by Freud. The exhibit also marked Freud's longtime use of certain models. Several preparatory drawings were included, and interspersed were paintings of those models (some famous and godly, some homely, some anemic and atrophied), a marvelous show of draftsmanship. I remember the strong marks of grease pencils, the muscled pull of burnt-bone black forming the contours of a swollen stomach. Hatching like a madman's topographical map, but distinctly massed. Technically sound.  Something sublime contained beneath a rage.

(Freud's longtime friend Francis Bacon had recently died, his liver devoured by drink and turpentine and a combative life. A theater of nirvana:  Baudelaire Twombly Rodin Freud Bacon de Koooning Turner Michelangelo and Rembrandt, kicking back with coffee and talking shop. Foucault and Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard.  Shostakovich Suk Dvorak discussing politics, cello accompaniment. An atopia of remembrance and passion.)

A good friend of mine used to wait on Freud at his restaurant in London. Lee would describe him as such: He wore a belt of old rope. He ordered oysters and a demi-bottle of pouilly fumee. His fingers were caked with paint and charcoal. he would sketch his lunch away on paper napkins that he would then shove in his pocket as he paid the bill. Quiet and elegant. Contemplative. But he always took his napkin drawings.

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beethoven's appasionato piano sonata and storms pass as kyote sleeps. i'm flipping through a book on rodin and admiring the straight eroticism of his work. to work, one must be in love. only then is the work credible. beyond love however, one can work in bursts off of lust, but it is an inefficient fuel. highly combustible and dangerous to handle. But sometimes its what one possesses:  Marvelous red fugues. Scars of touch on clay, touch of canvas. Clay, body.  Ether.

New Paintings by Deborah Petoskey at Caprice Bistro

Local artist Deborah Petoskey will hang her work at Caprice Bistro for a couple of months, starting the first Thursday of August. While she works in many disciplines, this show will focus on her paintings.

According to her website http://artbypetoskey.weebly.com, she creates art because, “Like breathing in and out, the creative soul finds itself in need of something more.” She appears to be a roaming spirit that wants to explore and expand things. She wants to be intrigued and to intrigue, and thus her art.

Petoskey savors spontaneous moments of paint and enjoys the details of a work. She sees the compositional pulleys move with visual weight, and she balances blocked planes of near-monochrome against charged paint-quilt areas. She gets involved in the nuanced spaces, operating in the smaller frames that converge towards the larger ones. Her process works through and against a sequence of material/idea application, interspersing language with urban & architectural references. Layers of masking offset a build-up of surface, a Benton-like push/pull effect, and she frequently achieves moments of good paint-handling. There is a joy in effect presented here, if somewhat raw. Unity wrestles dissolution as bold linework maps the stages of the canvas. Early Pollock comes to mind, maybe a note of Klee or Mondrian's experimental drawings.

Petoskey's compositions are abstract, whether one focuses on a section or steps back from the painting, and they satisfy in their nonobjective state. The paintings feel natural in their flux. The variety in scale and palette, even style, will allow for several visits throughout the duration of the show. Give them one chance and you'll give them several.

Caprice Bistro will host the exhibit of paintings in the Upstairs Sofa Lounge. The opening will be Thursday August 4^th From 7pm until 9pm.