Color Theory Query

A new development in my paper-cuts, I added some colored vellum yesterday to a composition. In my mind's eye, I was excited to color the violence red, the calmness of deep space a rich blue. In material, visible reality, it was ugly. I had added color to specific points, but that had unbalanced and upset the whole piece. I was upset to realize I knew nothing of color theory, and was tired of working all day on the piece, so I sent a photo of it off to a friend to ask for color advice, something I wouldn't have done a few years ago.

I was enthusiastic to get a very belabored and very considered response, as well as many offered color options. I was enthused.

The more we put things out into the world, the more we ask for collaboration and help, the more we get. I have been turtlish and embarrassed for much of my life concerning art - embarrassed that my works aren’t already great, and embarrassed about what they would imply about my own value.

But I am nothing! We need people to both fill in the skills we lack and perspective we don’t have - our eyes being fleshly locked in our skull sockets. We are fooled into trying to do so much, and be so much, on our own. Open up.

Anyway, I’m off to read about color theory now. One more notch on the belt.

Dwarf, Mirrors, Discipline of Liberation

I've been listening to Andrew Solomon's Far From the Tree, and stopped at this quotation from a dwarf:

“Believe it or not, the hardest thing for a dwarf is to meet another dwarf for the first time. When you look into the mirror, you don’t see a dwarf. You see what you want to see. But when you see another LP [little person] on the street, you see the truth.”

A strong image because it visualizes that dynamic of self-recognition. We maintain certain self-images of ourselves. We image ourselves both as better than we are, and worse, in order to maintain some kind of equilibrium. But then we - there we are.

The Mirror appears in - what stories do I know with the mirror moment as a critical part? The Never-Ending Story depicts it and talks about, but doesn't dramatically invest any particular power to it. Taran Wanderer does it excellently and subtly. John Ashberry - I had no idea what he was scribbling about.

An idea has taken me - discipline to write everyday. In the early morning, when, as the poet’s say, all thoughts are righteous, and which the other, normal people say nothing, as would be still nuzzling their warm pillows.

It is so easy to always be moving, from the next thing to the next. A discipline of reflection, a practice of intention and mindfulness. Are we just animals (I love animals), just soft machines, or are we awake? Do we want to slow down to both admire and criticize and change the way the pistons pump?

A Letter from Youth

I recently got an a-mail form a high school friend, and in it she attached a letter I had sent to her way back. 

It can be inspiring and fortifying to confront the passion of our youth.

The e-mail:

a letter that i found from you while going through old papers. it was written
on a large piece of watercolor paper, with a drawing of a male face in
profile in the background, with a beard:

"You can tell the immensity of the nature around you as you walk by
noticing just how little the sunlit cliffs in the distance shift in
comparison to the close trees that keep slipping by.  Upon descending
into the woods that led on to a creek hidden in between two mountains,
I felt as the rocks gave way to thick green trees and I was entering
into a deep secret organ of earth, and that the mystery was opening
its fragrant blooms...

I write.  I want to create stories.  I want to mold and set fire to
forms and characters and a world- our world; I work , alienation,
frustration, situations, solitude, upon sky and mountains, mountains
hiding each other in their shadows from the setting sun, mountain
cliffs with pine trees cluttered on their shelves, a world where two
people can in the midst of these continental shifts of hours and days
eaten up and eroded by the rising tides that threatened us with the
falling of eternity, clasp each others eyes and bring to the
foreground that mutual spirit that goes buried by the hard and
constant precipitation.  I want to tell it, a strange world, a world
where peoples moving lips producing light-hearted chatter can be
replaced with the sound of repetitive bizarre music that is movement,
like words without the unnecessary symbols.  A sad music that consumes
not just speech but all movement, the many feet on crowded sidewalks,
two people momentarily finding the others' eye in a large mirror, a
landscape passing by a car window.

A music that is greater than us, a music from the bottom of the ocean
floor, that is broader, colder than anything we could think of.  This
beyond human sound, telling of the secret of the earth's bowels is
born out of the darkest crevasses that penetrate the archaic and alien
ocean, where aquatic daemons beyond our imagination guard the source.
All these things, location and creatures, being found also in the
microcosm of our own heart, the only organ capable of such beyond
human imagination of the terrible and redeeming, the silent and
moving.

I want to create this music backwards from the surface of the ocean,
when a rare calm blows in after one storm and a worse one follows and
from which one can see or imagine they see the shadows of the phantom
stirring in the deep during that short respite."

i miss you.

love,

N