This has been a busy week!
I’m preparing gifts—hats and tote bags—to give to a group of young people coming from Chicago to Ireland, sponsored in the United States by the Boys and Girls Club, and sponsored in Ireland by the City of Cork.
They’re coming to my studio, where we’ll talk about leadership, the Umbrellas for Peace, and how we can all make a difference in the world.
I look forward to these encounters. These young people will eventually become leaders of our country. I believe that we should do everything we can to encourage them to become risk-takers.
I’m glad they’re coming here to spend some time with this old fool on the cliff! When they walk down the old brick road into the village, I envision them swinging their tote bags, going off to save the world.
As for my paintings this week—they have been blowing in the wind! The patterns that are coming out are very exciting to me. Every so often, I change out the rocks holding them down so they don’t blow away, and take great delight in seeing what happens when nature meets cloth and paint and a human being who doesn’t know any better than to introduce all these different and warring elements into something that can hang on a wall and be either detested or lauded.
It’s all great fun. Day in and day out, I don’t know whether I should put on my sun suit or my rain suit, but it really doesn’t matter, because they all have their place, their duty, and they all perform it, as do all the animals, insects, birds, cats, and dogs that encounter my paintings—some with great delight and some with paws, beaks, or claws. All are invited to come and look, walk through the melee, and leave their own impressions, whatever those may be. To me, it’s a grand gathering of species that intrigue and delight the conductor of the paint.
We had lunch recently with one of our friends who is a painter. She has some physical issues with her back. She also lives in a rural area, and her studio is separate from her house, so there’s a lot of room on her property to throw canvases around.
I invited her to come look at my paintings and see the madness of the drips and the paintings that are outside. For two or three hours we took great delight in observing the dripping of paint, the interaction of the sun, the wind, the rain, and the reality that every painting doesn’t have to be the Mona Lisa; it can be some strange relationship between paint, painter, gravity, and wind.
Her paintings are very striking and bold. I visited her husband’s new office, and to everyone’s great delight, three of her paintings adorn the walls, and they look very much at ease. They are strong statements of a semi-abstract and abstract mode, but she also explores all avenues of figurative work.
Because of the physical things she’s dealing with, she hasn’t been able to spend all the time that she’d like to with her art. I had to go through that a year ago with my back.
The fortunate thing is that we don’t have to spend hours at an easel. We can spend three minutes throwing paint on something and then watching it react to its surroundings.
We can also think intensely about our work somewhere other than the sanctity of our studio. To me, painting is a living, breathing, moving world. We are not the dictators; we’re just along for the ride.
Matt