Hello, bloggers.

With the new discovery and freedom that I encountered after my meditation a week ago, I hung all of the paintings that I had been working:  reworking, prodding, poking, agitating, in my studio.

Rose hadn’t been there for a few days, and then when she came, we were so busy moving, we didn’t have time to get into those new ones.  But after a few days we looked at them together, and she said, much to my surprise, “I really like them.”

Virginia Miller, who runs the ArtSpace/Virginia Miller Galleries in Coral Gables, has said many times that Rose is my best critic.  Whatever Rose says about the work, there’s no flowering or hesitations.  If she doesn’t like it, she says, “It won’t be your best.”  If she says, “I don’t like it,” I know to her it must be horrid.  I always tell her, “I’m in big trouble if you start liking all my work!”

So as I was looking at all the recent paintings, when I really took time to stand and look at the whole group and think about them as a total, the thought of the “Helter-skelter” Charles Manson crime scene, with blood all over the walls, came to me.  I expected at any minute for the CSI Team from television to start taking pictures of them, bringing chemical analysts back to see what happened to them.  Then I thought, the people from Numbers will come, and they’ll look for some hidden pattern.  They’ll leave wondering what the hell it’s all about.

I found myself wondering:  What is this all about?  What is the power and mystery that I have uncovered here?  I immediately thought of my childhood, when we played a game I remember was called “Goal...”  One of the things that happened at a certain point in that game, which was the same thing I did in my studio when I arrived there, was to scream:  “O-lee, o-lee, ocean free...  New player!”

And I thought, I’m the new player!  We have a new game in town, so let’s get into it!  It was like looking through old manuscripts and books and assessing and reassessing and wondering and standing back and not quite understanding.

When I got all through, I asked myself, “Well, Lamb, what have you learned?”  And I came up with a simple statement:  “You can put Humpty Dumpty together again.”  Meaning:  Nothing is impossible, but you have to be a little insane, stupid, a risk-taker, you can’t be among the crowd that’s always singing, “All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again...”  I’m always the fool saying, “Yes, we can, yes we can!”

So far, that’s what I’ve learned on this quest.  Don’t fall into the trap of thinking anything is impossible.

And that has manifested in dredging up new adventures from paintings that I thought were finished and ready to go out into the world.  When I do something else to paintings that I thought were finished, that creates a whole new problem.

Your first thought is:  This looks like shit.  But then maybe you turn it over sideways, moving with it, incorporating all the detail you hadn’t dug out before, and revealing other colors:  the springs of color that flow from the wound that you give to the skin of the paint that had hardly dried.  So everything that made sense before becomes nonsensical.  I’m beginning to think of it as a riotous garden.  It’s all kinds of colors that are floating around, pooling, and dripping.  It’s very raw and fluid.

It gives me another road to go down.  It’s like opening up a new highway.  I get on, first on my tricycle, and now I’m on my motorcycle.  Where does the road go?  I have no idea.

Matt