Nap Dreams

Why read. . .

2012-01-19T16:00:00.001-06:00

Have you read The Wretched Stone by Chris Van Allsburg? I won't give the story away, but the theme is that reading is good for humans.

And from my own experience, I can say I disagree. One of the problems with reading is that it opens up worlds. While that sounds exciting, it means choices scurry into your head. Ideas, potentials, thoughts perform covert ops on the conscious and sub-conscious. This mucks life up with possibilities.

If not careful the unsuspecting person may end up getting ideas. Life can take on subtle unfamiliar colors.

My life was ruined. This reading stuff lured me to entertain notions of art. Songwriting gradually consumed large portions of my time as readings of T.S. Eliot, and dozens of others' work deepened my imagination.

Now after a four year lay off from reading, with cataracts becoming a fading memory, once more the draw of books settles in on me. Sadly, it's resurrected songwriting. It's sparked the creative impulse.

So be careful of this dangerous thing called innocuously by "readers" simply "books." The description is short, but the impact can be devastating.

Eric to the Rescue

2012-01-09T16:17:00.000-06:00

After weeks of trying to figure out how to keep the recording process going, my son jumped in and let me borrow one of his interfaces. It's a beauty. Simple. Easy to use. And best of all, it's hands-down superior in recording quality over the interface I was using. Hope you enjoy.

This song was inspired by a need to link two songs in an early album concept a friend and I were cooking up. The project never came to fruition and I'm surprised I can still remember how to play this — one of my early songs. But with a little doodling around on the guitar, it came back to me. It was short and sweet weighing in at just over a minute long.

Square Pegs, Round Holes

2012-01-02T04:17:00.002-06:00

In the course of my life the jobs I've tackled has been varied. There's been lots of sweat-of-the-brow kinds of work like detassling corn, baling hay, milking cows, washing dishes, buffing floors, cleaning toilets, digging post holes, and hanging Christmas greenery. These were a natural thing for me. I grew up in a blue collar family. So as a musician/artist, I think of myself as a blue collar kind of guy.

In my twenties, I'd also gone the retail route, which was okay. But the slow days were murder and I was always wanting to check out of the job and go do something productive like paint or write or play music.

And when I got into my mid-thirties, I decided it was time to tackle the corporate world. All my friends were plugged into it. Making their way. Climbing the ladder, etc. I guess I figured I should do the best I could to try to do the same thing in order to add some stability to my life with four kids and a wife now in the mix. But I failed miserably. It wasn't for lack of trying. I'd longed to feel like I fit in — that I belonged. But the game left me clueless.

This never came home more than in the last corporate gig I landed. It happened because the CEO of this large corporation loved my creativity with words. He felt that the way I looked at things was unique and just the right kind of outside-the-box viewpoint his company needed to set them apart from the typical boilerplate kind of writing he was seeing his competitors burp out.

And in my desperation, I reluctantly decided to give it a shot. But there was this little voice in my head that kept saying, "they aren't going to want what you write. It's a little too fringy and creative." And six months in that voice was proving to be right. I was pouring every ounce of my vision and creativity into these marketing stories for the company and with each piece I submitted, more and more of my style was being excised from the articles. My offbeat word pictures were gradually replaced with tired clichés. By the end of my time with the company, all of the "talent" that I was told was the reason I was hired had been removed from the writing to the point where each piece was as interesting to read as a Dick and Jane early reader.

By the last year, I knew my days were numbered. They were inserting more and more people in between myself and the person I first started working under. It was a demotion and I got it. I was frustrated. I was told I was talented. The CEO loved my writing. He wanted my unique perspective. I was told the company wanted what I had to offer. But everything in the day-to-day of the work was whispering a different tale.

In the end, I got a call from the middle management boss and I could hear the platform drop from beneath my feet. They did tell me when I began that one of the things this company did was give a person enough rope to climb to the heights or hang. So when I got that call, I knew for certain I'd been laboring on that hangman's scaffold for some time. Now it was the manager's time to tell me I'd just pulled the lever.

It was all done with civility. It was done with a finely-polished marketing kind of vibey thing. He began by saying, "You've done a great job. You've certainly gotten the web content jump-started. Created lots of wonderful content. Helped guide the direction." Blah, blah, blah. And "oh, by the way, we have to let you go."

Hmmm. . . if I'd done all of these wonderful things, what the. . . Anyway, I hung up the phone perplexed. My immediate boss talked to me one last time and said, "Frankly, I have no idea why they got rid of you." And that was that.

Six years later, at nearly sixty, I am still scratching my head about that part of my life. And I see that as a creative I've always struggled with this "gift." And there has always been someone in my life who feels the need to take it upon themselves to help me. It's the "you know, you're so talented. I can't believe how well you paint. Have you ever thought of drawing little owls in a tree? You could sell them as family tree posters with peoples names on each cute little owl." Or "Hey, I loved your last painting about art. Have you ever thought of doing something with your talent like draw cartoons for the New Yorker?" And a hundred other iterations of these themes.

What this all boils down to is that people see something, but they don't know what it is they see. They want you to be able to make a living because they care. And in some instances they step in and hire you, then proceed with their best impulse to pound you through that round hole.

Maybe there's something about being an artist or musician that brings out that instinct in others. I don't know. It's something I still live with regularly, even with total strangers. They can't seem to help themselves, either. The oddest part of it all is there seems to be this assumption that I've not enough imagination to figure out what is a reasonable thing to do— that even after fifty-eight years on the planet, I've never pondered the various ways a person might express their talent.

All I know is, I try to smile and be gracious when that caring soul erupts into a discourse on what I should do with my life. Like the other day when I was in the chicken joint and one of the managers suggested I become a cartoonist. I smiled. Nodded my head and tried to act as if they were the sage bringing illumination. Feigned the best attitude of appreciation. After all, they figured out what I should do with my life after a minute-long conversation. Stupid me, I haven't got a clue with a lifetime of experiences in my field.

Because I do love people, I try to make them feel like they've done me a big favor. Besides I know they only mean well. : )

The Temptation of Hubris

2011-12-29T03:57:00.001-06:00

The past couple of weeks the perils of being an artist have nibbled on the edges of my thoughts. While there is a tremendous excitement in expressing one's creative passion through the arts, it's also a point of great peril woven into the daily workings of life as an artist — that temptation toward conceit.

This isn't solely owned by artists, of course. Anyone who feels a strong call on their life to some direction can be tempted toward conceit.

But since my life lands in the arts I was particularly preoccupied with how conceit slips in on myself. Getting me to ponder such matters was a book by Os Guinness. In it (The Call) Guiness offers some fascinating insights: "The greatest artistic creators may be especially prone to this conceit. Creators, like God, they come to see themselves as challengers to God. D.H. Lawrence felt it himself: 'I always feel as if I stood naked for the fire of the Almighty God to go through me — and it's rather an awful feeling. One has to be terribly religious, to be an artist.' Critic George Steiner glimpses it in the 'awesome encounters between God and the more god-like of his creatures. To have carved the figures in the Medici Chapel, to have imagined Hamlet and Falstaff, to have heard the Missa Solemnis out of deafness is to have said, in some mortal but irreducible manner: 'Let there be light.' It is to have wrestled with angels."

So the cartoon this week was a bit of a poke at my college days again where some of the conceit was fanned to full flame. There was almost a religious fervor wrapped in some of the conversations exchanged during those years. That atmosphere was too hard to resist poking a little fun at this week.

Anyone for Squash?

2011-12-29T03:27:00.002-06:00

This time around the painting wasn't going to escape my grasp until there were some elements of the painting process that found some resolution. Color back in cataract world was always a challenge and something I was using based on my memory of color and not what I could see.

As I've lived with new-found clarity in my vision, my understanding of color is slowly coming back and it shows in the way this painting turned out. The way I'm applying the paint, now that I can see, allows for better color choices and the ability to make better decisions on how to define the edges of the objects. That's an exciting aspect of painting after the surgery.
.

Squash on a Paint Board - SOLD

5" x 7" - acrylic on canvas board

Merry Christmas

2011-12-18T14:21:00.001-06:00

Calvin and Hobbes: I admire Watterson

2011-12-12T16:21:00.003-06:00

My earliest memory of an interest in the arts came in the form of comics and church music. With comics, it was Archie and Peanuts. With music, it was the chance to add a harmony to a hymn using only my sense of hearing the harmony in my head.

But Calvin and Hobbes is the penultimate comic. Bill Watterson's writing and drawing skills interleave to create the perfect comic strip. That's why so often when I am trying to convey some thought about the arts, it will find it's expression in a Watterson-inspired image, just like the one above.

This week I have been contemplating this idea of creating, of writing songs, performing, etc. If you don't have any desire to dabble in these areas, it may seem somewhat mysterious why anyone would try this. For the majority of creatives, there's no money in it. There's usually little respect. And the rewards can be fleeting or obscured completely by the lack of interest from any audience.

That's why it was tough when all four of my children grew up with this creative impulse as part of their landscape. This was something I didn't necessarily discourage in them. But my wife and I tried to paint a vivid picture of what it would probably be like to pursue anything in the arts.

On the other side of the coin though is this adventure that comes with this creative journey. Whenever I sit down to work on a new song or a painting there is this exciting anticipation of discovery. There is never a time when it's not that sort of experience initially. The ideas captivate. The chase for that mysterious something, that vehicle of words or chords or imagery that invokes an integrity and power fitting to the idea.

Somewhere in the middle it usually becomes an anvil-bludgeoning mess as the hammering out of the idea becomes an endurance test.

When these excursions are successful. . . wow! But they are rare.

Creatives have their stories about this kind of pursuit of some sort of perfection or synergism of their creative efforts. For example, famous clarinetist Artie Shaw of the Big Band era, once remarked. "Maybe twice in my life I reached what I wanted to. Once we were playing 'These Foolish Things' and at the end the band stops and I play a little cadenza. That cadenza — no one can do it better. Let's say it's five bars. That's a very good thing to have done in a lifetime. An artist should be judged by his best, just as an athlete. Pick out my one or two best things and say, 'That's what we did: the rest is rehearsal.'"

Jazz legend John Coltrane, who played for Miles Davis and Dizzie Gillespie, expressed a similar observation after one amazing performance of his composition "A Love Supreme." When the final note was put to rest, Coltrane stepped off the stage, put down his sax, and said, "Nunc dimittis." (These are the opening Latin words for Simeon's ancient prayer, traditionally sung at evening prayers: "Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace for mine eyes have seen thy salvation.") It's that sense of believing that he could never play the piece more perfectly — if nothing else came of his life — that thirty-two minute jazz prayer would've been worth it all.

These are the moments in a creative life when never happier — those times when we are allowed to express the deepest gifts that reflect who we are as humans.

I can think of one song of the two hundred plus I've penned where I believe I've created something that joined in me a similar response as Shaw or Coltrane articulated.

Sam Shovel, Private Eye: A Cartoon Noir

2011-12-04T22:38:00.000-06:00

It had been a slow Monday evening. I'd plan to spend it with two buddies. Good buddies. They've kept me company on many a holiday. One's a hang-onner. The other resides in a flask. That's right I was going to burn time with a leftover turkey sandwich and a bottle of the hard stuff — Diet Pepsi.

I had just tipped back in my chair, taken a bite of sandwich and had a blast of soda to clear my palate. Suddenly there was a buzz from my hi-fi. It was an obnoxious buzz, like an angry bee who'd just been told the IRS was auditing his books.

Just then a tall slender dame came into the room to ask if I was recording tonight. I wanted to. How I wanted to. Her eyes sparkled like a crystal decanter in the flashing neon chicken light. How I wanted to, just so's the dame could see how Sam operates. But that buzz was gonna rob me like a crooked lawyer.

As I took another pull off a candy cigarette, I'd figured it out. There was only one conclusion to come to, Eel-faced Ernie Electric had planted a bug in my office. He'd been wantin' to cut in on my territory for years. I poured another shot of soda and looked at that sultry vixen through the smokey glass. Her face was angelic as she pulled her fur coat up against her throat. I told her to relax, I'd handle this.

She left me in the dark and the loneliness of the night. Left me to unravel the dirty tricks. Left me to the solitude of my office and that nasty buzz. Why did fate deal me such a bad hand? Why did. . .

"Michael. . . Michael. . . Honey, wake up. You fell asleep on your keyboard. You've got a bunch of key indents on the side of your face. How can you sleep in that awkward position? I thought you were going to record a song for your blog tonight?"

"I was. . .uh. . . whoa, I've got a problem, Rhonda. I've gotta figure out what's causing this horrible buzz every time I try to record. That means I've gotta trace the signal flow to see what's causing the problem."

EPILOG:
Five hours later, after swapping out different cables and pieces of gear, I found out it was the audio interface I've been using for the past couple of years. Oh well, maybe by January I can get a new interface so I can return to my original intent here. In the meantime, I'll try to keep you entertained with ideas, etc.

Knowin' His Will - song #7

2011-11-08T03:06:00.000-06:00

What's in a Name?

2011-10-04T10:23:00.003-05:00

Since the studio is still in flux, (can't find my audio gear) I thought I'd pause to share a song by Holly Brook. I ran across her music two years ago. Singer-songwriters tend to be my music of choice to listen to most days. And hers is an interesting story. She no longer goes by Holly Brook. This intimate tune like many of her others as Holly Brook, are replaced by Skylar Grey and her hip-hop/rap collaborations. Her Wisconsin girl-next-door persona has been replaced with an edgy, black fingernails, leather, and hair vibe. Her translucent vocals are now buried in heavily-produced arrangements. She used to hang out with Duncan Sheik, another singer-songwriter sort. Now she is kickin it with superstars like Dr. Dre, Rihanna, Eminem, and P Diddy.

I admit to my disappointment. Not because I'm against hip hop or rap. But because the heart of what she writes is buried so deep in this new persona and career that it's hard for me to access now.

But I don't blame her. In an interview I'd read, she said she was tired of doing music and being ignored. She wanted people to hear her music. No surprise she bailed for the footlights of commercial music. Her plays on YouTube went from the one or two thousand as singer-songwriter Holly Brook, to ten million + plays as the featured artist with the big guns of popular music.

This is a tough choice for artists to make. There's not much of a living to be made unless you choose a path like Holly Brook took. It comes down to the question. Why do you do what you do?

: )

Season Suite - Song #6 written in Dec. 1976

2011-09-12T12:22:00.000-05:00

This is probably my most enduring song. Most likely I will ask my wife to make sure it gets played at my funeral because it has a retrospective feel to it that accesses my deepest desires. When I listen to it, I'm still surprised at how much it is a part of who I am 35 years later.

At the time I wrote it I was young, full of dreams and hopes, and held a simple belief in many things like faith and friends and family. The years have raked over these beliefs and I feel pretty tattered and worn. But at the heart of who I am, it can be said that I still find a place in me where the lyrics hold true. It's buried in a pile of rubble, but sometimes I turn over a stone and catch a glimpse of it - like when I find myself sitting in a Taco Bell by myself and realize I have been completely lost in the antics of sparrows in a fresh bed of mulch. Then the cares of this life fall back in on the moment and that outlook is overwhelmed. But it's good to revisit this simple song.

"Changes" - song #5. written in Dec. 1976

2011-09-05T01:12:00.003-05:00

A '70s "mello" singer-songwriter finds it hard to write anything close to a rock tune, especially one who comes late to the game still trying to shake off the mesmerizing sweetness of The Carpenters.

But in 1976, when I was getting ready to cut my first demo, I was looking for a way to add some contrast to the songs. I goosed around the neck of the guitar in an open-G tuning, voicing chords in hopes of finding something that would grab my imagination. When I stumbled on this tune, the words came to me quickly.

In retrospect, this sounds roughly-crafted with little flair for the poetic. But it proved to be popular with some fans. I wonder if it was simply because it was almost a rocker. : ) It does have some of that Stephen Stills acoustic vibe going on.

P.S. Posting some of these songs is going to prove to be tough. The temptation is to hide the clunkers, even the merely mediocre. But I will try to remain true to my initial aims as this blog unfolds.
<p>&amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;After&amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;gt;</p>

Song #4 written in 1974

2011-08-30T15:01:00.004-05:00

October of 1977 and I (with Bill McKay adding backing guitar) had just opened for the group Suncast in Kirksville, Missouri. After the show was over one of the band members, Jon Phelps, approached me. On the strength of this song "Do You Feel," Jon asked if I'd be interested in making a demo of my music. His enthusiasm surprised me. I told him, "sure, I'd love to record my songs." Then I wrote off the incident as him just trying to encourage me.

But in December, Jon called and asked me if I was ready to record, that he had booked studio time. I told him I was ready, but after I hung up the phone I was in pure panic. I only had one song that I felt comfortable recording. So over the next week I penned three new songs for the demo and we tracked them at Pinebrook Studio in Alexandria, IN just after Christmas. Greg, the bass player, Jon, and I played on the tracks. The picture for the video shows us together listening to one of the takes for the demo.

I will be posting the other three songs to this blog in the future.

Take to the Country by The Painted Soul

2011-08-23T18:17:00.003-05:00

"Take to the Country" is the third song penned by me. Rhonda and I had gotten married in late December 1973 and moved into a trailer in Canton, Missouri in January 1974. She was finishing school and I was miserable at the local IGA grocery.

Since Rhonda was overwhelmed by school, I had a chance to listen to a lot of music. As I've mentioned in previous posts, one of my influences is James Taylor. It comes out in this tune, what with the country theme. But I was also listening to ex-People band member Larry Norman's music. His lyrics prompted the imagery in the song.

The song was written that summer in our trailer and the last image in this video is a sketch of me from those early days in my life. Note the carefree look? The hair? The lack of wrinkles?

Kansas City: Home of my Second Song

2011-08-17T21:38:00.000-05:00

If We Could See Everything in Retrospect

2011-08-12T11:47:00.001-05:00

Dread. Or boredom. The rangy Iowa farm boy wasn't sure which was clutching at his thoughts. He was clutching his notebook like a fig leaf as he leaned against the wall. Waiting next to the door leading into a dreary course in elementary functions, taught by a dreary man who read in monotone from the lifeless textbook he'd penned.

For the moment, the kid was mesmerized by patterns cast by the September light streaming in through the wall of glass across the hall. This little-over-eight-minute-old signal from a distant star, played in the stairwell. It's hypnotic dance washed across students as they spiraled mindlessly down the steps. Golden light. Flickered and fused in random patterns. Dissolved. Collided. Painted the marble floor in silhouettes, then splashed in abstractions across the wall.

Suddenly the spell was broken. A figure had caught his attention. A woman emerged from a room next to the stairwell, saw him and walked toward the kid. She stopped inside his personal space, looked up into his blushing face and said, "You have the most beautiful eyes." Then she nudged closer, nearly touching him, refusing to release her gaze from his.

There was an eternal two-second silence. He replied, "Yours, too," and he felt like leaping down the stairwell, hearing how stupid it sounded spilling from his lips. But she just smiled, then walked away as the door to his class opened. He watched her disappear into the flow of students moving by like a river through the hall. Watched as she disappeared round a turn of the hall. Then he entered the cell holding elementary functions.

A few days earlier he had met her sitting with some of his friends. She was introduced as "Joan," in a hurried round robin roll call at dinner in the dorm cafeteria. He'd never given her a single thought. Someone as striking as she wouldn't be interested in him. Now, he was mystified by her actions as the drone of his professor died in the stagnant air.

He decided she was just messing with him, and dismissed the encounter. But the following Monday and Wednesday, with their classes in that building, Joan would walk over and speak to him. Within two weeks they were together every day. Joan loved music and the kid would play guitar and sing with her for hours. They climbed trees together. Threw football. Joan could put a beautiful spiral on her passes.

It was common for Joan to be hit on regularly. But she made a point of reaching over and grabbing the kid's arm or winking at him in the middle of some guy's pick up line. She seemed to know when he felt insecure and would say just the right thing to destroy his insecurity. For five or six intense weeks they had been inseparable. He was absolutely crazy about her.

Then one day after dinner, she walked him outside and asked if they could sit and talk. They held hands as they settled on the dorm steps. She didn't hesitate. She told him they needed to go their separate ways. When he asked why, she told him, "You give your heart away too soon. Hold something back. Make sure the other person is at the same place on the road with you."

He was devastated. He felt gut-kicked. He was lost. A week later Joan came up to him at lunch and handed him a sheet of notebook paper. On it she had copied the poem The Road not Taken. She simply said she wanted him to have it, then turned and left. He read. He understood. But it deepened the loss. And he was certain he'd never get over her, that there was no one for him, that he'd never love again.

It's almost thirty-nine years later. The sun is streaming in through the studio window. The Iowa farm kid, now on the cusp of old age, stares out the window at a late summer St. Louis sky. The stillness of the scene is interrupted by intermittent flashes of yellow and black as goldfinches flit from cone flowers in the garden to the nearby trees. In a few moments he leaves to eat lunch with his wife.

This morning those memories of youth lie in the sun like unearthed stones. The kid's amazed and amused by his recall of Joan. Amazed because both Joan and he met their lifelong partners just weeks after the miserable break up. Amused because of how flat and pale that farm boy seems when he rummages through the emotions and thoughts that still remain a part of his memory in old age.

And the kid still loves Joan. She will always be a part of him. He will always be indebted to her. The break-up was a gift masquerading as sorrow. The richness of his marriage bears witness to this fact. Joan had set the table for the love of his life.

I thought it might be entertaining to have back story on the song posted. It's the first song I wrote. It is amusing to hear the lyrics, so heartfelt, of this 19-year-old kid. My wife and I still have some contact with Joan. She was and is a woman we both are glad was part of my life.

What's in a Voice?

2011-08-02T02:25:00.002-05:00

I feel like I am just hitting my stride in some areas of my life. Sure, I can't run a marathon in under four hours or entertain the notion of playing linebacker for the Rams. But at nearly sixty, I'm gaining insight into aspects of life that had mystified me in the past.

One such area has been music. Lately the question rolling through my thoughts has been, what is it that helps me connect with a recording artist. Most of the time when I read reviews, the writer focuses on the lyrics and the music. While good writing and music are certainly essentials, I sense more often that the characteristics of a voice and the way an artist uses his voice can make or break a song. If they understand what they have written or what they are singing and have some personality in their voice, they can intensify the experience of the performance of a song.

Performers who come to mind are singers like Sarah McLachlan. The fragile, transparency of her vocals and the way she loves to voice a phrase emotes such sadness or vulnerability. David Crosby at his best, emotes longing through his phrasing and dynamics.

All you have to do is go on YouTube and listen to the remakes of an artist's work, by sometimes fairly talented people, to realize just how awful a song can be if the person doesn't understand what they are singing nor has the pipes to tackle a song.

One of the artists who has helped me begin to understand this aspect of music has been Duncan Sheik. He is gifted at writing and has the ability to convey his imagery. His album Phantom Moon was a gem. The mood of those songs was deepened by his vocals. I stumbled across this video of one of his songs. It demonstrates his capacity for conveying a mood. Enjoy.

Sorrow, Creativity's Spark?

2011-07-24T17:07:00.003-05:00

The sky glows a sullen gray and intermittent tears fall from these heavy clouds. And two families are rummaging through our rental home trying to decide if they are going to take up where we leave off in mid-September.

We have no idea where we are going. This isn't new. This is the norm. And I hate it. These people put a fine point on the transient nature of life. This situation pushes in on thoughts about life, my standing on the rim of old age. This life always invites to sip of bitter wine. I do so reluctantly. I do so, because the alternative is unthinkable. . . most days.

And the odd thing about the disappointments and brokenness of life is its capacity for creative expression. In the 50-some years I've been here I've seen so many sad situations, so many tragic moments. It makes me pause. And when I'm alone, I think, rave, rage, and eventually concede to the stored tears. Sometimes I'm reduced to despair. But sometimes mercy leaks into the moment and I am able to work on a painting or sit down to compose a song.

Maybe the reason the creativity comes is because at the core of things I recognize there is more than bone and gristle to this life. Miraculously, there is something eternal wrapped within the heartbeat of this planet and the ordinary everyday created things. Somehow this makes sense. There are hints, left like a trail of breadcrumbs. Hints to the smaller meanings.

But like the deepest reaches of the sea, it's the profoundly disturbing sorrows that remain beyond intelligibility. And most days that leaves me feeling lost. It leaves me yelling, "I want to buy a vowel!," something to make this bearable.

So the real challenge is to be willing to keep seeing the flickering good emanating from those smaller parts of life. It's an act of faith to pull out the brush and paint the little things. It's an act of faith to write about the ordinary. And ultimately, it's an act of humility to get up every day and live out the day as you are made. But it's also an act of courage to live well. Because ultimately none of us gets out of this alive. It's how we respond to that prospect and process that makes all the difference.

Sleepwalk

2011-07-17T23:09:00.001-05:00

A greasy diamond of sunlight splashed across the cafe floor kaleidoscoping into shards of broken light when the door swung open. A gaunt 15-year-old kid in jeans and blue pocket tee stood in the entry, hesitated, hurriedly rushed to the counter, then awkwardly dropped onto one of the seats at the end of the counter.

As the kid pulled a worn menu from its holder a weather-beaten farmer exclaimed to no one in particular, "It's hotter than Sam Hill out there today. Good day for baling hay." Farmer friends on both sides of him nodded. The waitress Sherry, who was patrolling the lunch crowd, smiled in agreement and leaned in toward the kid to take his order. He slightly leaned back and buried his face in the menu. Sherry was a hearty woman in her twenties, over-amped — just a bit too much of everything woman. Her physicality always unnerved him.

There was no need for a menu. The kid's order was always the same: hamburger and a Coke, 82¢. That allowed him a dime for an afternoon Coke out of the pop machine.

Sherry took his order back to the kitchen and the boy looked around the diner as he waited. He liked the place. It was small, narrow, low ceilings, with a u-shaped counter than seemed too large for the room. The air conditioning groaned out a tolerable temp. But the air was still and everyone in the place seemed to have a sheen of dampness on them.

When Sherry brought his meal there was always that moment of decision. Where did he look when he ate? Part of the time he watched the flies. Some madly buzzed against the window. Some practiced aerobatics to elude a swatting farm hand. As he ate, he'd often look up to see a host of flies fastened like barnacles from long straps of sticky fly paper suspended from the ceiling at strategic spots around the diner. He mostly listened to the push and pull of conversations. Idle talk, about corn and soybeans and hogs and cattle and long-hair-hippie-what-we'd-do-if-they-showed-up-here. This was a place with the world in a coffee cup. He liked it. He mostly thought of nothing. And to a hungry teen, the burger, side of free chips, and Coke tasted like heaven on a suffocating summer day.

As soon as he downed his meal there was no lingering. The kid worked across the street at Coggon Feed & Supply. He needed to get back to put the phone back on the hook. His dad, the boss, gave him permission to take the phone off the hook when he went for lunch. The kid didn't want to ruin that huge deal so he was always back in twenty minutes.

This was the summer of Woodstock. But in Coggon, this was a summer like any other for the kid. He fished. Camped. Some nights he sat out under the stars waiting for one to rocket across the sky. He fed hogs. Bailed hay. And dreamed of nothing, oblivious to anything beyond five miles from his home. It was bliss. He had no imagination for a life other than the feed store.

The mystery was his capacity for keeping the outside world at a distance. Like Houdini he managed to escape all thought of the chaos in Vietnam and America. The world was flat, easy to understand. And whenever he began to waken through exposure to ideas or experiences, he somehow managed to crawl back into his cocoon of safety.

That changed for good when the kid was shipped off to college in Missouri. He met people who shook his world. People who were passionate about ideas. People who ignited his imagination.

One of those fire starters was Jon, a guy who was with a band, Suncast. They'd come to campus to play a concert. The farm boy by this time had discovered music, and had been playing around town at coffeehouses. He was asked to warm up for the band. Afterwards Jon came up to this kid, now in his twenties, and asked him if he ever considered going to the studio to cut a demo.

Throughout the next thirty or so years, Jon has wandered in and out of that guys' life. Jon has been a success. He has lived big dreams. The kid didn't. Somehow the inertia of growing up dreamless stalled out his future. He never believed that he could realize his dreams. Never believed he had enough of whatever it is that makes doing those big things possible. And maybe that more than anything has been his bane.

Still, he is thankful for these friends, like Jon, who have given him so much to think about, thankful for the creativity they inspired in him, thankful for showing him the world was big and round and infused with mystery.

French Cafe Music

2011-07-01T12:33:00.002-05:00

That's what I call the songs that seem to touch with the deepest part of who I am. They are the B Side of some 45s. It's that song woven together with the threads of melancholy.

This morning in one of my pensive moods I dialed in to YouTube to listen to a couple of songs that my son had sent links for me to check out. After watching, I realized I was in one of my somber funks, so I checked out Sheryl Crow. Hmmm... an unlikely candidate for this old guy. But I like her music. She and I even went to the same church eons ago, before she bailed out for LA and fame. And today she had the song I was looking for to fit my mood. If you have an imagination, you can almost hear the concertina accompaniment to this soulful lullaby. Just listen.

Big Bill - Slow Awakening

2011-06-06T23:21:00.003-05:00

"Mind if we drop by Bill's," Marty asked as we trucked up Franklin Street. It was late fall at the burnt end of daylight. It was frigid and a blast of air had just poured into the back of my collar like a shot of ice water. We were dragging guitars along to go play a coffeehouse. I was more than happy to take a break from the cold.

We weren't two blocks from campus when Marty darted down a sidewalk toward an unremarkable house. I followed as we climbed a dull stairway to an upstairs apartment. Inside the air was thick, basted with the lingering aroma of supper. We were standing in a cramped narrow room used as kitchen, dining, living room.

Bill met us at the door and Marty and he jumped into conversation. I stood transfixed. Bill was stuffed into a white dress shirt set off by a black and brown waistcoat with pocket for a watch. Black work pants and Jethro Beaudine boots polished the ensemble. He looked like he had stepped out of a 19th century novel except for the fact that his hair flowed over his shoulders, cascading in rivulets, settling nearly to the middle of his back. As Marty and he talked, Bill's intensity and appetite filled the room.

Bill welcomed me to sit down, but I couldn't. This place was filled with mystery. This was pure overload. This was pure pleasure. I had to explore.

There was a wacky weed pipe leaning in a clay bowl set on a homemade bookshelf of pine planks and bricks. Plants grew from macrame-slung pots strategically suspended near windows. A painting of a blue nude woman, who seemed to be more landscape than person, hung on a wall near the entry door. There were books of poetry set about with bookmarks denoting the reader's progress. The furnishings were a hodge-podge, evidently, of whatever Bill could buy cheap.

Growing up, the places I had lived were Spartan, and devoid of nothing but essentials. Our library: eight or nine nonfiction titles and a set of used World Books. In the living room: two chairs and a couch with television as centerpiece, bare walls except for a Winslow Homer print of a boat on the sea hanging above the TV.

Slowly, I acclimated to the atmosphere. As I settled in a chair, Bill's wife came in. His wife? Bill was my age. Eighteen. Married? It suddenly felt as if someone had tilted the room or my mind. I tried to adjust to such an idea as Mari Jo gracefully reclined at one end of a couch. She laid her head against the couch's shoulder and folded her legs in under her richly-patterned gypsy skirt. She didn't say a thing. She observed.

I sat in the chair in wonder. Sat and tried to decrypt the scene. Sat, reading the titles lining the shelves of the makeshift bookcase. Bill and Marty were deep in conversation as I sat there staring at a set of encyclopedias with the luster of new gleaming on their spines. Bill noticed. He dropped the conversation with Marty long enough to ask what was up. To which I replied, why have a brand new set of these? I didn't pose my question as I had thought it: Why spend good money on these when you have mismatched furniture and a board and brick bookcase? Bill seemed to know my thought. He answered that learning was important and a good set of encyclopedias should be part of the foundation of everyone's home.

Something was going on inside this place. Foreign. Alive. Vital. And I seemed the only one surprised by its intoxicating energy.

We had been there maybe thirty minutes when Marty signaled to go. Out into the night I could feel the aura of culture slowly peel away in the brisk air. But it had left an impression. It had opened a door. And Bill and Mari Jo had given me a vague awareness of something beyond utilitarian living.

I can't imagine my reality without that encounter. In the ensuing years, Bill and Mari Jo's world spilled into mine. It made me richer. It formed questions in me I couldn't have asked on my own. They opened a door that a lot of other friends helped me walk through. I began to experience culture through books and art. My songwriting improved as I began to soak in diverse writings of fiction and nonfiction. Now and then Bill and I would sit down for an intense music session. He tried to help me improve my playing. "Try" being the operative word. I owe him lots and am honored to call him one of my musical friends.

Two Steve Gs and Their Influence

2011-05-30T17:23:00.001-05:00

There's something humbling about being in the presence of a soul kindled by, to you, what may seem an ordinary event. More often than not, that awakening happens when people are young. Age jades. Experience flattens. Or, as we get older, sometimes we are afraid to be seen as "ignorant" of some knowledge of the world.

Test it. How often have we been in conversations where we're retelling some poignant experience and someone will break in with "Aw, that's nothin.' One time I" (fill in the blank). It's as if somehow we're all running around afraid we may seem less interesting to others if we allow ourselves to revel in their experience or insight. Too bad. We miss so much by keeping ourselves at a distance from the people who amble through our lives. We miss opportunities. We miss hearing the rhythm of our lives. Many times I'm guilty of that kind of self-absorption, fired by my desire to be "interesting."

But there have a been a few times where I've stumbled into an unknown world — not by any reason other than the fact that for that moment I was self-forgetful enough to just come along for the ride.

One of those instances was my first semester at college, when I was trying to get my sea legs for this strange life. The incident did a deep-burn to memory.

It happened early one Saturday morning. Two guys I barely knew, Steve Graff and Steve Goeke, dropped by, kicked the pop can aside I was using to keep the door open for ventilation, and barged in. Graff jumped on my bed, trampoline-bounced me out of a dead sleep, taunted me to get up, to go downtown with them.

Saturday mornings on campus were saturated with silence. Most of the non-suitcasers didn’t shake out the day until nearly noon. Weekends were for deep-sleeping, but the Steves weren’t going to let me resubmerge. Groggy, I dressed and went with them.

Four blocks walking in the brisk morning air scraped the mud from my mind. Six blocks evaporated the remaining brain-fog. We trekked the east side of Franklin Street as the sun illumined the west side. Trees sparked, a lingering dew refracted on spring buds. Windows fired silver-gold, splashing unintelligible heliographs along the sidewalk. Eight blocks, the southern edge of downtown Kirksville.
Graff had kept a free-fall monologue rolling. Goeke and I trailed along in silence. I remember none of the talk. Shadows and light. Sky and cloud. The morning of gleaming houses. Those occupy my memory slots of the walk.

We pushed northward and crossed the street midway through block two of downtown. They were taking me out for breakfast at a donut shop squeezed between Rinehart’s magazine/bookstore, and a nondescript building housing Cundiff Insurance.

Trays of jostled donuts were displayed in the grungy shop window inside a smudged glass case next to a counter. The interior was shabby, donuts dry as dusty biscuits. Like so many small towns, the shop expressed the incongruities of making a living. The owner had installed two second-hand pool tables in hopes they would shore up a failing donut business. They didn’t. The place became a restaurant a year later.

We sat down. Graff told me we were stalling until Stouts opened. I sat facing that blast of morning sunlight, thinking, mesmerized by the slow motion dance of dust motes in that blazing room. I tried to choke down one of those nasty donuts. Tried to understand why they wanted me to tag along. No good answer would surface. We played a game of pool in that sunbathed room, waiting, then off to Stouts. It was half a block north and left at the corner past Pagliai’s, home to killer Canadian bacon subs and fabulous thin-crust pizza.

As we rounded the corner Graff said, “I thought you should know, the owner of this store hates me.” I grinned, thinking he was kidding. “No, really, he doesn’t like me, but it’s the only place around that carries Martins.” I shot a glance at Goeke for affirmation, who responded, deadpan, “Yep.”
Halfway down the block we stopped and stood before two large storefront windows, each set at an angle, as if to funnel customers in toward the front door. Multi-shaded purple mosaic tiles ornamented the floor of the entryway. The odd collection of musical paraphernalia stuffed in the windows made me feel we were about to enter a quirky music junk shop. The Steves hesitated a moment, then dove in. I followed, excited, the eighteen-year-old from Iowa who had never been in a music store before.

Inside... there he was, mid-sixties Mr. Epperson near the back of the store, starch-stiff posture, silver hair oiled back, crisply-suited. He greeted us with a granite scowl intensified by the too-few, flickering fluorescents.

A long aisle shot straight back from the front door. We plowed in, past a niche displaying a kalimba, kazoos, maracas, finger cymbals, and the dusty, ever-popular Lawrence Welk spoons. Past a lit glass case crammed with Hohner harmonicas. Past a row of crowded counters edging the left side of the aisle and Wurlitzer pianos diagonally parked on the right.

Graff nodded and said, “Hello,” as we hurried by the old man. His scowl deepened. We climbed a half flight of steps to the guitar section in the back of the store, where Goeke and Graff began shelling Martin guitars from their cases.

I was shocked. Could you really take a guitar out and play it? I tossed a glance back down the stairs toward Mr. Epperson. He was still frowning, but made no move our direction until he heard a flat pick put to guitar strings. In a bounding move up those steps, he charged our position to inform the guys to put those picks away unless they were buying RIGHT NOW. Graff shrugged, looked at Goeke, each tucked a pick away in a pocket.

Over the course of the next half hour the Steves explained what made a beautiful guitar. Talked about the grain of the wood. Tight grain and symmetry for beauty. Types of wood. Spruce and rosewood for warm tones. Maple for brightness. Goeke finger-picked Freight Train. Paused. Talked about string action, medium-low for playability. Harmonics. Never heard of harmonics. When Goeke belled one on a Martin D-35, I was stunned by its crystal-pure sound. They put the guitars away. We headed for the door. Mr. Epperson grunted a grudging “uh, huh” when I thanked him as we passed by. I left, convinced that a Martin would be the dream guitar I’d never be good enough to play or rich enough to own.

Memory bank fails as to what happened next. Those guitars, their voices, the morning, Mr. Epperson. . . overwhelmed, vivid. . . all I remember.

Three years later I had the privilege of getting to know Mr. Epperson. He hired me. Tracing back through his life, I realized his attitude had fossilized as the Big Band era faded. He’d never gotten over its demise. The dissipating past owned his heart, which left nearly no room for the present. Life was eroding him.

That became vivid one day after Mr. Epperson waited on a customer. In a rage of frustration, he sailed a rock album past an employee’s head, just missing him, exploding the disc into vinyl shards. He told me it was because the customer returned this “piece of garbage” as defective. But it was a moment of unrestrained grief at the passing of his day in the sun.

I liked him. He liked me. Sometimes we’d listen to his stash of ’40s vinyls. He seemed to take pleasure in my knowledge of the music he loved. And sometimes when one of his favorites unreeled, I’d catch the hint of a smile, and his features softened as he stared off into some memory-traveling dream.

Tonight I’m sitting in my studio running the chords of one of my songs, reveling in the responsive way the frets and neck and fingers work together, belling a harmonic as I do an after-tap of the chord, listening to the sustain, wholly absorbed. And tonight I’m awake enough to remember Mr. Epperson’s friendship and generosity that made it possible for me to own a Martin, the dream guitar I still play and love.

Getting a Skeels Set

2011-05-23T19:33:00.001-05:00

<p>&amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;gt;For a ki&amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;gt;</p>

Sometimes if we are fortunate, we meet someone along the way who encourages us. Now I've had a teacher or two who were able to inspire. But those kinds of people are rare. And it seems sad since I think most people need encouragement.

My second semester in college I met a guy who told me to go for it — to try writing a song. I don't know that he saw anything in me other than my avid loyalty to his music. His timely words were all I needed to test the waters.

So in tribute to him the video above showcases a song Marty wrote. A friend with a cheapo tape recorder captured this session in Marty's dorm room in the spring of 1972.

The recording was awful. And this recording was actually recorded by placing a mic in front of a speaker while the original tape played in a cassette deck. When the tape ended it shredded, so I'm glad to have this rare audio history.

Marty was my first exposure to someone who wrote songs. And I am indebted to him for setting me on this road. Now I'm not so sure the rest of the world is so thrilled about it. : )

Peacocks Wander Aimlessly. . .

2011-05-14T14:49:00.002-05:00

In last week's post I highlighted The Lee Shore by David Crosby. The version I selected from YouTube was the most satisfying performance I've watched of that song. Crosby's phrasing and timing in this version seem to be nearly perfect for the imagery and music. Nash's willingness to refrain from harmonizing every note fit this version well. And of course, these laddies were in their prime as artists.

Since I am still recovering from emergency surgery, I decided to choose another of David Croshy's songs to highlight this week. Guinnevere ignited such strong feelings the first time I heard it. The strange tuning, the vivid imagery, and the dissonant harmonies paint a haunting picture. This song has been one of those I've used as a landmark in my songwriting. Still in search of the kind of effect Guinnevere has on me as I chase images, ideas, and melodies. Enjoy!

In Search of the Ineffable

2011-04-30T16:03:00.002-05:00

In last week's post the theme was early musical influences. And thinking back, I did listen to some other pop artists when I was in grade school. The Monkees. Dusty Springfield. Bobby Vinton. I heard them because of older brothers to my friends. But at that time in my life I hadn't awakened enough for their music to have any lasting effect.

The awakening came from listening to Simon & Garfunkel's music, as I mentioned in an earlier post. But also the music of Joni Mitchell and Bruce Cockburn. Simon, Mitchell, and Cockburn probably painted the strongest influence on my lyric writing.

Then when I got to college a friend introduced me to "4 Way Street" by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. The album was a staple in the stashes of many of my friends record collections during the early '70s.

What drew me to CSNY's music was not the in-your-face screaming guitars thing they were doing, but the underlying dissonant harmonies and chords so foreign to my experience. Those elements of the music got in under my radar. Those elements reverbed against the longings that seemed to percolate just below the surface. Those elements are at the heart of what perpetuates my passion for music.

When I heard their music with the amps and electric guitars stripped from the mix, I'd been put on a lifelong journey.

In some of these songs, in particular, some of David Crosby's work, there is this sense of mystery and longing. It's woven into the fabric of the dissonance and melody. There is an ineffable quality — that sense that these songs live deep beneath the surface, whispering to us of something transcendent. "Guinnevere" and "The Lee Shore" resonate most powerfully. I've chased the haunting atmosphere and the way these songs affect me in my songwriting for nearly 40 years. I wish I'd written either song. Instead, like Captain Ahab, I have chased this elusive "white whale." (appropriate, since both songs weave imagery of the sea into them.)

In some of my songs I can feel the hint of that experience I so ache to convey. But so far I've come away realizing the elusiveness of my dream — that's the joy and sorrow of creating.

The video below was recorded on September 11th, 1970. The sparsity of the instrumentation enhances the sense of longing I feel when I hear this version of "The Lee Shore." Wonderful imagery and story.

The Lee Shore
by David Crosby

Wheel gull spin and glide ... you've got no place to hide
'Cause you don't need one

All along the Lee shore
Shells lie scattered in the sand
Winking up like shining eyes, at me
From the sea

Here is one like sunrise
It's older than you know
It's still lying there where some careless wave
Forgot it long ago

When I awoke this morning
I dove beneath my floating home
Down below her graceful side in the turning tide
To watch the sea fish roam

There I heard a story
From the sailors of the Sandra Marie
There's another island a day's run away from here
And it's empty and free

From here to Venezuela
There's nothing more to see
Than a hundred thousand islands
flung like jewels upon the sea
For you and me

Sunset smells of dinner
Women are calling at me to end my tales
But perhaps I'll see you, the next quiet place
I'll furl my sail

Chasing Time Back

2011-04-25T21:17:00.002-05:00

As I chase back through time to the earliest events that may have formed my future, I can see how music has always affected me in a powerful way. I grew up in church. We had no record player at home, so hymns were what I was mostly exposed to in grade school.

When I moved on to early high school, my dad hired a senior, Denny, to work in our feed store. One summer Denny dragged in his record player and a stack of records. Glen Campbell and Bobby Goldsboro were the records that attracted me. The melodies were catchy. The words memorable. And the harmonies were lush. And there was something about that singer/songwriter vibe that got in under my skin. I felt like they were writing about their lives. So I played the life out of those records that summer.

Denny's records and player went off to college with him in the fall. In the meantime, my sisters got this album by some group called The Carpenters. And yes, I admit it, I loved it. The harmonies were ridiculously, tooth-decay sweet. The songs infectious. So I enjoyed listening to them, too.

That was more than forty years ago and I hadn't really thought about that music until a couple of weeks ago. Bobby Goldsboro had an art show at the university across the street from us. I went. I saw. His paintings were selling well. He's 70 now and decided to turn his career to art when he turned 65.

In retrospect, those were important experiences to listen to those artists. It sparked me to want to get a guitar, which I bought when I was 15. I didn't learn to play it until I was 16. But Goldsboro and Campbell had set the hook on my interest in music.

Tonight I went online to listen to my favorite by Goldsboro and that Carpenters' tune, too. I wanted to share them with you. Laugh if you want or must. But I had to start somewhere and this was what showed up in my reality as a adolescent. : )

Reluctant Traveler

2011-04-18T17:24:00.001-05:00

The event had been set. Advertising bucks spent. And in October of 1977 John Michael Talbot rolled into Kirksville, Missouri in his mini-camper/pick up, exhausted and less-than-excited about playing another cow palace in some unmemorable town. He tried to bail on the concert earlier in the week. But the promoter told him a wad of cash had been spent to promote the concert. Besides, they had a contract.

So the weary road warrior sequestered himself to his vehicle as a team of enthusiastic event staff pulled together a 30 ft backdrop reproduction of his album "The New Earth." I was among the crew, setting up chairs and basically hanging out.

But I was also the warm-up act for JMT. I was nervous. I'm not good in front of people. Would anyone show up? What if a lot of people showed up? What if I goofed up? As my uncertainty grew, JMT came in for a sound check. When he hit the first riff on his guitar, I turned to a musician friend Eddy and said, "I'm not going on." And I was DEAD serious. JMT was so sure, so grooved, so comfortable, and a great guitar player. Why not? He'd been playing since he was eight years old. He'd been a member of the band Mason Proffit. They'd had a hit in the '60s, Two Hangman. Now Talbot was on his own and good at this performing stuff.

Eddy looked right at me and said, "Doesn't matter how good he is. You're not him. You got your own thing to offer people, so go play like you mean it." I did get through the evening and Talbot did inspire me to work on performing. But I've always been a reluctant participant in performing my music - don't like my guitar playing and certainly find my voice lacking.

As far as I know there's no tape of that concert. Good thing. I don't think I could face how bad I was that night.

Musicians and Hopefuls

2011-04-11T19:12:00.000-05:00

Musician, I'm not. Musicians are people with the capacity to make a song their own.

When I was in college I knew a couple of guys who could do that. One was Marty, who was never a slave to covering another songwriter's work note-for-note. Instead he had this gift for putting the song in his key and with his groove. When he performed, it was as if he had written the song himself.

Another friend, Bill was the same way. His particular gift was an ability to turn the music into his own through a fine mastery of the guitar. I have always admired his ability.

In my case, I would say that I am a songwriter who is still aiming at becoming a musician. In all of my years as a writer, I've heard people complement the music. They love the songs. But I have never been fortunate enough to hear someone say they loved the way I played the music.

And that's significant.

What has always drawn me to any artist's work is the way their voice or their playing access my inner landscape. I walk away from their music changed, inspired or pensive. That may be a tip off to why I am drawn to the singer-songwriter. There's an intimacy in their music that attracts.

This week I've inserted videos of two artists that have found the key to my inside world. Tommy Emmanuel, because he flat out has this amazing skill. When he plays, it's as if he and the instrument become one. It has inspired me to try harder at playing the guitar.

The other artist is James Taylor. The first time I heard his music was in high school. The song was Fire and Rain. He makes you believe that he went through this. He makes you feel the imagery. And his voice and guitar fall together in this seemingly simple song. But go look at anyone covering one of his tunes on YouTube. He owns the tunes, they just play his songs.

It seems unlikely I will ever become the kind of artist I dream of being. But I will travel hopefully. Work on my craft. And try to learn the secret to making my songs sound like I own them. : )

Backlit

2011-04-02T17:43:00.001-05:00

My first eight years of school were spent in spaces of light and sky. Every room had a wall of light. Outside light. Light that soaked into the eyes, sank into the heart, and lifted my hopes under the grind of learning. The light that made me class fool as my teacher drew my attention back through those life-giving windows to stammer, “Sss-sorry... could you repeat that?”

Rooms of wood and weather. History you could touch in the ink-stained, grooved surfaces of those rock-oak desks. Those graffiti carvings you memorized through the course of a year as you became skilled at writing without poking through paper with pencil.

Pencils, No. 2s. Pencils I sometimes broke intentionally, so I could go to that sharpener. The sharpener that woke the senses. Turning the crank stirred the scent of lead and wood, spinning out a thick, pulpy sound. I’d pause, check the point — pushed to palm, sometimes plugged back into the sharpener for a few more spins, returned to my desk, restlessness relieved for a little while.

Then, halfway through my freshman year of high school, the newly-consolidated school district moved us out of the old building. I suppose this new high school was designed to maximize learning and offer efficient climate control. The ceilings were lowered to eight feet, the wall of light deleted. In its place, a shallow niche with two recessed, narrow windows faced each other at right angles to the classroom.
When we moved into the building, we freshmen boys were never late for class that first few months. We were focused on getting in early to scrum for the seats by the windows. In December it got intense, with some of the guys ending up trapped in a fought-for desk like toddlers on tipped trikes.

A couple of our teachers heard about the free-for-alls, eliminating the problem in their class through assigned seating. But the need to referee gradually disappeared as the year wore on. Even the best view was like looking at a landscape through a slotted spoon. The brightest sun could not illuminate this inner sanctum of dullness.

The hallways were dismal passages of dark brick and weak light. In between classes, clusters of dimly-lit bodies wound together in muted, variegated patterns. It felt like a hive and we were being groomed for subservience to some unknown queen bee.

The first two years in that building I muddled through my day in a vague act of compliance to my state-ordered sentence. Kept to myself, mostly. Attempted invisibility. Did the work and marked time to the 3:10 escape bell.

The start of my third year brought American Lit into my life, taught by fresh-out-of-college Miss Deatrick. Satiny features. Shoulder-length strawberry-blonde hair parted down the middle. Whenever she’d looked down to read, her locks would slide forward over her face. It always sparked the same unconscious move. She had this way of drawing the cascade of hair gracefully along the edge of her index finger up over the ridge of her delicate left ear, as if pulling aside a silky veil to let the sun caress her porcelain features.

Throughout most of the year we read novels and short stories, then came the beginning of our last nine weeks. At the Friday bell, Miss Deatrick announced we would start poetry the following Monday. There was a corporate groan. She tipped her head, propped her hands on her hips and squinted at the ceiling, but kept silent as we filed out of her room.

Monday morning, second hour, we all found our spots. A shabby record player, with a nickel-colored speaker grill on the side, sat on the corner of Miss Deatrick’s desk. She handed a stack of mimeographed sheets to the person two desks in front of me. The stack was passed back in a snaky “s” pattern, up one row and down the next until it reached the other side of the room, dwindled and disappeared. The strong smell of mimeograph ink evaporated from the pages, a tip-off that these were hot off the machine.

Miss Deatrick dropped the phono-arm to album. “Are you going to Scarborough Fair?” We were to read along with the music. I couldn’t. I stared at those narrow windows. They were ablaze. Felt the light. Heat. My own heartbeat. Intermittently glanced at this stranger at her desk. Mystified. Intrigued and wholly absorbed by the images in that music.

Side A ended. My breathing returned. A fragment of an early memory kindled. There it was, that something, that longing, mingled with my attraction to this woman. Dazzling confusion, it was the wall of light having found its way back to me. Foreign, more intense, backlit my soul with the power of those words and images spun by Paul Simon’s lyrics.

Miss Deatrick hooked some of us on poetry, gradually slipped us into the work of Dylan Thomas, and Robert Frost, and T.S. Eliot, and a host of others, even Shakespeare. She’d done it cleverly. Done it with Simon’s reference to Dylan Thomas. Done it by quoting Simon’s Dangling Conversation: “And you read your Emily Dickinson. And I my Robert Frost.” Quoted as she passed out mimeos of their poetry. Connected the songwriters to the poets and the contemporary poets to earlier poets until we’d traveled a couple hundred years back in history.

The other day I was sorting through some files when a folder full of my 11th grade American Lit papers and handouts spilled across the desk. As I sorted through my stilted stories, essays, and poems, the comments by Miss Deatrick were far more fascinating than what I’d written. “Watch those long involved sentences.” “Rhyme scheme is good. Content clearly stated.” She had a way of criticizing the writing without crushing the writer. Somehow she knew the delicate balance between critique and encouragement. Possessed the gift of teaching.

One of the last things she said to me was to consider a writing career. Could I do something like that? By 16 I had only read eight or nine books that weren’t assigned, three of those Hardy Boys, so I couldn’t imagine being a writer. Somehow she could. And it’s made the difference along the way.

Passage

2011-03-30T20:11:00.008-05:00

You couldn't mean what you said, Lee Ann. Lee Ann, athletic, sparkling dark eyes, popular and one of North Linn's hellions. She had just divulged her contempt to her inner circle and anyone within earshot in the hallway. Joleen and Kathy shook their heads in agreement as they chop-stepped off to their next class together, bound by their skin-tight miniskirts.

She could hardly wait to escape this crummy little school? That was unfathomable. North Linn sprawled on a rise just outside of Troy Mills, population 200. The highway department had bladed a bypass road off the main asphalt to handle the school traffic congestion. I loved the place. There were friends, good teachers, a decent administration. It felt safe. Life was uncomplicated.

It was mid-April when her sentiment began to circle like a vulture over the days leading up to graduation. A lot of other seniors caught this fever and added inertia to the feeling.

But when we lined up in the hallway, capped and gowned and graduated, the tears poured. Now the most outspoken girls were sobbing and hugging everyone. Oh, it was a smoke screen, this tough talk. That's what cool people do to deal with change.

There had been a miserable rain dogging the last few days of school. But when we stepped outside after the graduation ceremony the front had exhausted itself and a tired sun painted fire on the cars in the school parking lot. As I dodged puddles I thought, "This is it. We've just been disconnected forever from the life and friends and teachers of this school." It was a depressing thought.

Next afternoon a rusted up VW hippie bus crawled up our farmhouse driveway. It was Pete, my best friend. He'd stashed a sleeping bag, tarp, food, book and a radio in the back. I flipped my gear in through the bus back door and he kicked the starter as we rolled back down the drive.

Our plan had been to celebrate graduation with a week-long float trip down the Wapsi River, which my dad said was nonsense when I told him about the idea. He agreed to let me have two days of camping, then it was back home to work in the feed store. I was disappointed. Pete, too.

So the old VW sloshed over our muddy gravel road, rocking on weary shocks, Pete silent at the wheel. We had our history. The silence was comfortable.

In our last year of high school Pete and I had gotten close. He loved to read. I didn't. He was smart. I was slightly above average. We agreed about practically nothing. Like the time he gave me the book "The Herod Experiment." He told me it would open up my mind about human sexuality. After reading fifty or so pages I gave the book back to him. When asked how I liked it, I told him the "experiment" was pornography masked as research. He just chuckled quietly to himself.

A drizzle spit on the windshield. About a mile down, the road dead ended into the Wapsi. But there was a turn off that passes the backside of fishing cabins — worn out tiny clapboard houses — hugging the edge of the river, rarely visited. We pulled into the lane and the VW grooved shallow trenches, sometimes bottoming out in the soft spots. Pete was absorbed in avoiding the mudholes and I was looking out at those houses huddling under a canopy of trees. With the drizzle, the gray, the menacing trees, and the silence, an unsettled restlessness smothered my thoughts. This restlessness had been hounding me on and off for a few weeks. It seemed to have more substance in this sullen landscape.

The silence broke with the squawk of Pete's door opening. We were stopped at a barbed wire fence that marks the boundary of the farm I lived on. From the fence to our campsite meant hauling gear about half a mile. It felt much farther. And we looked like two little kids trying to lug home the end-of-the-year projects and school supplies, stopping to pick up some dropped item about every thirty feet.

When we reached our site, Pete gestured out from under his pile of goods toward the freshwater spring. A three foot wide dead oak, soaked to the root, had fallen, pointing like a finger downstream. The trunk rested in a cluster of young elms. We took it as a sign and suspended tarps between those trees. Then we gathered soaked firewood and watched as the river slowly climbed out of its banks with each hour, watched the time pass drearily as we coaxed a stubborn blaze out of the wet wood. Each of us took a place against the dead oak while frying bacon and eggs, conversation minimal.

By evening the river crested, stranding us on a peninsula of soggy ground seeded with thick patches of poison sumac. Night arrived in wispy patches of fog. Pete read and listened to the radio. I just listened, nursing a protective blaze against the mist and the dark. By ten, the fire was embers and we retreated to our tarp tents and dreamless sleep.

Morning and afternoon of the following day was spent in vague motions of wandering the swollen lip of the river. I'd pause to stare mindlessly at the diminishing line of mist-cloaked trees on the opposite shore. Fought to hold focused thought against the hypnotic surface tension of the broiling floodwaters. Traced the river bank with sight until it blended in an oblivion of fog-erased detail. Stockpiled deadwood for the night siege.

We pulled supper together by the campfire. I kept glancing westward, staring at the waning features of the land. Tried to burn a time-lapse sequence of the oncoming night to memory, blazing these moments into my brain forever. Maybe this exercise of will and thought would hold back tomorrow. I watched as the features of the land receded into the darkness. Then, amid the evening eggs and toast, that eroding uneasiness of the past few weeks hovered at the edge of the light. Pete seemed unaware, cleaned the fry pan and settled against the sinew of the fallen oak with his book. I joined him, dropped a log on the hungry flames, launching a flurry of sparks. As I settled against the corpse of that oak, I searched the sky for a wishing star. Lightless void.

The air chilled and I edged closer to the fire, propped my feet against an opposing tree, pushed coals into erratic patterns with a stick, felt the heat lapping against my face, comforted by the cocoon of light that kept out the night. Pete looked up from his book, "Maybe you could call my girlfriend when you get to college. She's going to Northeast, too." He knew. Why was I surprised? He and I had talked about 'after high school' over the past few months. He knew I was terrified of being uprooted from my safehouse life. For the rest of the evening I felt relief. He'd gotten it out in the open as matter-of-factly as he always had in our friendship.

The rest of the evening we wove intermittent small talk with comfortable silences. It is unclear now just when, but sometime late in that night vigil, I dozed in a thin veil of sleep. At some point Pete netted a radio signal out of Little Rock, Arkansas. Somehow it had snaked in between the bluffs, sneaked in under the clouds bearing Pete's favorite show, Beaker Street. Hosted by Clyde Clifford on KAAY, it was a concoction of the hottest underground rock. All sewn together with interludes of Clyde spouting hip '60s lingo, overlaid with moaning, moody, psychedelic sound fields. I'd come to the surface as if bobbing on a wave, bump into some fragment of a song, then settle back to the bottom in some hazy dream.

Around 2:00 a.m. a voice pulled at my sleep. Dark chords sounded as a haunting melody filtered into my consciousness... "We are stardust. We are golden. And we've got to get ourselves back to the Garden." The night seemed alive. I sat, transfixed, listened as my heart ached with that song of sorrows. Listened, in wonder, at the beauty of this woman's voice as it curled around the poetry, burning singularly in the night air. Listened, as she poured out visions of peace. Listened, stirred by the restlessness in her music.

With the last dying note I stared into the embers, then finally broke the spell by asking Pete if he knew who she was. He looked up from his book, "Joni Mitchell. Woodstock." Then he dove back into his book. Maybe it was the time of year or maybe it was the time in my life, but something inside had been wakened and a thought had been planted.

Next morning Pete and I packed. I was in no hurry. I scanned our campsite, etched image to memory. Pete and I saw each other a few more times that summer. I went off to college. Next summer home, we met maybe, a few times. After that, no contact.

Then I finally took the pilgrimage back to North Linn, seeing old classmates at our twenty year reunion. I saw Pete standing near the door, walked up to him, and said hello. He nodded in recognition. The once comfortable silence had become awkward and eternal. I told him it was good seeing him and that he hadn't changed a bit. Which he hadn't, except for some gray in his sideburns. As I walked off to sit at a table alone I realized my graduation thought had proved prophetic — our disconnect was complete.

Beneath the Trees
(30 years after the graduation camping trip I wrote these lyrics)

Late night,
with Beaker Street on.
Firelight illumined her song.
Drifting in a mist,
beneath the trees.
Long shores,
hemmed by gray silhouettes.
Frail forms
flow in aching silence.
Drifting in a mist
beneath the trees.

Drifting,
in this fading light.
Restless to the soul.
Longing for the call to say, "come home."

Burnt embers,
circle of light,
hold back the cold.
Dreaming in a mist.
beneath the trees.

© Michael Barfield

Wonderin' Where the Lions Were in 1979

2011-03-22T17:24:00.001-05:00

The light fell across the bricks of the aging Kirksville courthouse, carving sharp patterns of shadow and light. The town square was nearly deserted. Late day. Early spring. My soul, restless because it was spring. The land was alive and I was stuck in Stouts Music House waiting for anyone to come in to break the monotony. Radio was company and the local station was drilling me into boredom with the usual Top 40, so I feathered the volume to low.

Then this guitar began spinning an infectious tune. It captured my attention. As I cranked the volume this offbeat vocal unreeled strange lines of lyrics and I was hooked. When the song ended I looked the guy up who had just painted this wild word picture. Over the next couple of years, I bought everything he recorded.

Looking back the song still enchants. Looking back I see how it changed my way of thinking about lyrics and content. Some call him the Canadian Bob Dylan. I'm just glad he got a chance to record his music.

As a Diversion from my Usual Fare

2011-03-16T21:59:00.001-05:00

Sometimes it's so energizing to discover someone whose work is alien to my own - alien enough to inspire, and with such excellence that I'm tempted to burn my guitar.

This week I bring you the work of fingerstylist Andy McKee. His music is akin to Michael Hedges, an amazing guitarist I stumbled across back in the early '80s. If you're not a guitarist, it might be tough to fully appreciate McKee's talent. If you are a guitarist, sit back and chant to yourself, "yes, there is a place for the rest of us to play our music. Yes there is a. . ." You get the idea.

Sit back and soak it in. Cheers!

The One Band I've Influenced

2011-03-07T10:48:00.002-06:00

For most of my life I've been a singer-songwriter with a passion for lyrical content. When I was in my teens I heard Simon & Garfunkel and was awed by the imagery woven into these beautiful ballads. In fact, most of my record collection is comprised of singer-songwriter's works.

With that as background, fast forward to the past few years. My oldest son, Eric, is the songwriter for the band Watching Judas. Like his father, he was powerfully affected by music from an early age. Seeing this passion in him, it was a goal to slowly expose his thinking to the music and lyrics of the artists I believed were excellent at conveying their thoughts. When Eric was in his teens he got a good dose of recording artists with excellent songwriting imagery.

When he began to write songs, I encouraged him to read. Read, because literature is an effective way to learn how to write. He did. Dickens, Dickinson, Dillard, Dylan Thomas, Eliot, and more.

We talked and continue to talk about music regularly. And it has been an absolute joy to see his songwriting mature. What amazes me is how well he's woven meaningful lyrics into moving music compositions.

As a self-taught, play-by-ear musician it's especially thrilling for me to see how quickly he surpassed my talent. His mother gave him foundations to music theory that were further deepened by access to a fabulous high school fine arts school.

That knowledge has forged a diverse path for Eric. It has allowed him to create in a wide variety of styles, making him capable of composing from classical to jazz to modern forms.

To demonstrate that this just isn't a father bragging, I've posted a music video of one of Watching Judas' songs. And yep, I'm proud of Eric's brother, too. He's the singer in this video and a fine composer in his own sphere. Enjoy!

The Trouble with Poets

2011-02-26T11:38:00.002-06:00

Life is strange, heartbreaking, beautiful, disturbing, tragic, frustrating, boring, intriguing and more. Making sense of it seems less and less possible as I've aged. The living of it has a way of shutting me up. I find myself less verbal, more reclusive, hesitant to wade in with "solutions." Being part of this whacked out mystery pushes this soul to the brink of insanity.

But along the way, there have been those creatives who have kept me between the ditches. Since I feel so often like a displaced person, these life observers have helped me to feel less alone. Like the time I read Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Her descriptions of the natural world made me feel like someone experienced the world in the way I have.

On another occasion I was at a concert for a specific artist. He had a warm up act. The warm up guy hopped on stage sporting a mechanic's shirt with the embroidered name tag "BOB." His name was not Bob. And he unreeled a fascinating pile of shuck about his childhood, none of which was factual. It took watching him awhile, with his wry sideways half-smiles, to realize that he was putting us on. He played the guitar like he was born with it. And then I felt the connection when he played his song The Trouble with Poets. His song made me smile. It was true. I wish I had written it.

Artists like him remind why I love music so much. The connection with the lyrics and the music have kept me trying. Their work energizes my own creative efforts. Sometimes it's the only thing that gets me back at the easel painting or writing or working on music. So I'm glad of the mercy that is in these creative gifts. Still I sometimes wonder if I will survive. : )

Listen to the song for yourself. See if you can identify with it. If you aren't super creative, be thankful. You're probably less likely to be crazy.

A "Heap" of Things to Think About

2011-02-15T11:38:00.003-06:00

As work progresses on documenting my songwriting, other artists are never far from my thoughts. This week Imogen Heap's work has been forefront in my mind.

If you don't know her work, you ought to check it out. Not everyone connects with electronica. But even this old folk-rocker finds her music intoxicating. Imogen is a fine musician. She has a flamboyant facade she conveys to her fans. It's personable and quirky in the best sense. Though I suspect, like many artists, she is a shy person.

One of the aspects of her music that attracts me is the way she creates lush musical atmospheres. Listening to her album Ellipse has made me aware of how important rhythm is to the music making process. Her capacity for keeping all of these layers of sound together is contingent upon the strong beat she infuses into her productions.

She's also an amazing recording engineer. The album is finely crafted, a project I can sink into like a trip out on the road.

To give you a taste of her music I've embedded a video made for her song Canvas. The video is beautiful. The video is enigmatic. As the song unfurls, the film portrays slow motion vignettes of a person slogging through a snowstorm. The images and lighting remind me of a series of Caravaggio paintings. Enchanting.

Like most pop songwriting, this song is about a relationship - a strained relationship. It's a common theme. And common to pop is the limitation of not being able to dig too deeply into the problem of love in a fallen world of broken people. This isn't a criticism, just an observation of the difficulties of making a song catchy while presenting a deeply meaningful point of view. The artist usually resorts to a sketch of the situation. And Heap is effective in cascading fragmented verbal hints to clue us in.

It would be grand to know what the imagery in this film means. I'd say there are some metaphors being wielded, but I'm probably not tuned in enough to pick up on them. An example, the final scene shows a large iceberg in the distance and this lone soul, who's made this expedition through an icy wasteland, plants an easel with a black canvas on an ice shelf bluff. I suppose it is the barrenness of the relationship that's being conveyed.

Heap's music is worth checking out. She creates finely-crafted art that has pushed me to think about the idea of rhythm and sound crafting.

By the way, if you have some thoughts about her work, I'd love to hear your take on her music. Just drop me a comment here. It's better if I'm not thinking in a vacuum. : )

Young Buck Fantasy

2011-02-10T17:58:00.001-06:00

When I was a young lad in my twenties, I worked at Stouts Music House in Kirksville, Missouri. The store was this eclectic bag of musical interludes. If you would take time to browse, you could unearth all manner of oddities. Lawrence Welk spoons, 1920s flapper sheet music, harmonicas, pretty much this collection of items left over from poor inventory habits.

I loved the place for its funkiness.

And one of my dreams was that some day someone would come in, pick up an instrument and rip off some amazing music. It never happened.

But recently I stumbled across a video that mimicked my fantasy event. The video shows off the amazing talents of one of my favorite bands, Nickel Creek. When I first heard them I fell in love with their musicianship, songwriting, and vibe.

Enjoy. . .oh to have had them drop by Stouts and pull one of these sessions. I wouldn't even mind them breaking a few strings in the process. : )

Who Said Plans Work Out?

2011-01-25T17:03:00.000-06:00

So we draw up our plans, hammer out the details, forge the will, prepare the mind, and then the body goes south for the winter.

I've had a nasty flu and it has settled in my throat, so singing is out of the question, unless you enjoy hearing renditions of songs as sung by an Andy Devine or Mr. Haney from Green Acres sound alike warbling tunes at you.

Guess I will be waiting to start the recording for a bit longer. But I'm not getting any younger as I wait.

In the Meantime. . .

2011-01-05T16:01:00.006-06:00

The holidays have moved on. My son's wedding is almost here. Where to next?

Since August of this past year I began another blog with my weekly ramblings about the artwork I create each week. It's titled This Visual Feast. In this blog I explore the thoughts behind small paintings I am working on daily.

It's been a challenge since I have had so many health issues. But I'm surprised to realize that over 60 of my paintings sold through this blog in those four months. The success of this project may have something to do with the affordability of these intimate paintings. Just $50 gets one of my original 7" x 5" paintings. So, I am continuing that blog into this year. Will be fun to see how the work transforms as I continue to paint these one day works..

But in the meantime, I am also getting back into recording music. I've finally ditched my archaic way of recording to begin the new year documenting my songs via my Mac and LogicPro. I'm comfortable with this form of recording, thanks to my oldest son who pushed me to learn it so I could mix albums his band Watching Judas recorded.

After working on the WJ albums with their stacks of layers and electronica, recording my little project is a dream.

So for the new year I am hoping to have new songs for you to listen to which chronicle my career as a singer/songwriter. Stay tuned and keep your fingers crossed that these health issues will resolve enough so I can be more productive.

Check out the songs I've recorded through the years.

Finally delivered TPS to friend via UPS

2010-12-20T22:10:00.005-06:00

Eight years later. . .

Last Friday I finally put The Painted Soul: Photographs into the hands of reliable old UPS to send off to the people I was paying back a debt. Somehow I thought I might hear a band play and corks pop and streamers fall from the ceiling. Nothing.

This is the part I dislike most about being a creative. Sure, the pay stinks. But this thing of pouring your heart into something that, under the current atmosphere, draws a yawn ninety percent of the time is mentally grueling.

We are living in a time when there are more people being creative. The viewer/listener has greater access to the arts than at any time in history. Yet, I'm convinced that mostly this access has only jaded us.

For instance, I belong to a couple of art sites where people are free to post comments. There are nothing but positive comments on my pages. Encouraging, right? But go to any artists' pages (there are millions) on this site and you will see the same comments I received.

And those comments are as interesting as white bread. "Nice." "Superb." "Fine capture." When I see those same comments on artwork that's just plain bad. . . well, it devalues these already cheap commodities as quickly as the American dollar.

It's not much better with the music side of things. I have a bunch of "friends" on my music site. They're all musicians. They write me regularly asking me to buy their recordings. These sites contain thousands and thousands of bands and singer-songwriters. Gosh, talk about a gluttonous mess.

This creative buffet is stuffed with deep-fried crud guaranteed to clog the arteries of your soul. How much will I be willing to gobble down as I hunt for those soul-nourishing repasts?

And I'm not sure that I'm not contributing to the problem. How would a creative know? Every person I see on these sites believe they have something worth saying. We are told "it's all about us." Really? We can't all be that fascinating, can we? Is every creative impulse worth listening to or viewing? Or have we become a culture where self-absorption is our consuming passion?

The problem is only going to get worse as the internet shuttles new ideas across our screens at light speed. There are no reliable filters. And who's going to shuffle through the growing pile of creative impulses to sort it all out? It's too much for me. I've tried.

Maybe you have a really cool solution I know nothing about. Shoot up a flare and let me know.

As I wait for the new year to crawl over the horizon, I retreat to my fortress of solitude to ruminate over the next project and debate if it's worth doing or if I have something worth sharing. : )

What's possible?

2010-11-05T16:51:00.004-05:00

Today I've been thinking about how I will present The Painted Soul: Photographs to the beneficiaries of the original art, writing, and all. So the first thing I did was haul out all the pieces that comprise this project.

The most exciting aspect of "Photographs" is the work master craftsman Rollie Montgomery added to the story. He has a wonderful gift. Go to his site. You'll love looking at all of his fabulous creations.

Since getting the right box was an important part of the process, Rollie carried a running dialog as he crafted the box. I left the design wide open for him. I knew I could trust him because his work is just stunning. When I received the box, I was blown away. He'd thought the process through. And he did a wonderful job of dialing in just the right feel and look.

In fact, read what I wrote to him the evening after I got this box. He posted it to his website.

Dear Rollie,

First off, thank you, thank you, thank you! Even though you kept me in the loop at every step of the process with great photos, they just can't capture the beauty of the final box. It was overwhelming to see how you transcended my idea for this gift box. I knew when I saw your work posted on your web site that if there was any way, I wanted you to be involved in this project. But pictures just can't convey the physicality of hand-crafted wood. I put your "Missouri Possible's" (LOVE that by the way) box on my butcher block table in the kitchen. Sat with it for 30 minutes just soaking in all the detail and craftsmanship. There's something profound in seeing these fine woods put together into an art piece. I kept opening the drawer over and over. Love the sculpting. The hinges are just perfect. And the best aspect of the box is the sense of human hands have respectfully put this together in a meaningful way.

Now, as I sit here admiring the Missouri Possibles box, I realize how much I'm going to miss owning it. It is my hope that it will make my friends who are receiving this project have as rich of an experience as I have had living with this box for awhile.

And if you ever need to be inspired, please make yourself the proud owner of one of his boxes. Craftsman like him are a vanishing breed. Besides, his work is reasonably-priced and should be seen in person in order to appreciate it.

Where to from here?

2010-11-02T13:45:00.004-05:00

Good question.

I've been so absorbed by creating The Painted Soul: Photographs project that I gave no serious thought to the direction I'm going to take. Part of it has to do with the fact that I've not completely finished the hand-made book. It's disappointing to be unable to find a person who can do Coptic binding. The web has shown no one except for a Daniel Essig. He does an amazing job. But he is also out of my price range, I'm assuming, since he didn't respond to my query about binding the book.

So it leaves me somewhat stuck in a holding pattern. There will be a print-on-demand version of the book available sometime in the future. But it will take some serious work to do the design and get it to one of the POD sites.

In the meantime, my health has taken a turn for the worse and it has me feeling paralyzed. If you knew me, it becomes obvious I'm not crazy about life 95% of the time. It would be wonderful to be one of those people who is so in love with life that the days, the months, the years seem too short.

For me, I have been a reluctant traveler from my earliest memories. But I admire those souls with the power of hope brimming over. . . but I have to take them in small doses. : )

Final Thought from The Painted Soul: Photographs

2010-09-13T16:34:00.004-05:00

Figuring out what the last piece of art would be for the book, The Painted Soul: Photographs took some time. In the end, I settled for a self-portrait. The reasoning was that I have been through so much over the past few months that I felt like it showed in my features and in my overall physical demeanor. When I began to spend the time trying to capture my likeness, I became more convinced I had made the right decision. And what cemented the idea I'd made the right choice was when I stopped by one of my home town hangouts and had one of the waitresses remark, "Are you okay? You look like you're going through something rough."

She was right, of course. The spiritual dimension to life is ever-present in my thoughts. There are huge questions about this broken world and God that tax my beliefs and erode my hope. I have wondered if I will survive them. Which is a new experience for me, because when I was young, these questions were more theoretical than experiential. I was healthy. The world was an oyster, as some said to me when I was young. Time unfurled like a seemingly endless highway. So the questions didn't carry the weight they bring with age.

Now I am getting old. My health has eroded. Friendships have faded. My thoughts aren't important to the people around me. (They felt like they were when I was young.) My apparent usefulness in the work force is waning, as I've come to find out when applying for tough positions like store clerk and being rejected.

This stuff causes serious rethinking for me. And I can see the weariness in my face now. The eyes are dull. My skin tired.

But that is what life does to some people. Others, like high-voltage Jack LaLanne, who at 93 acts like he's on speed, seem to rush to the next moment like it's a nourishing wave of happiness. I can't relate. Surely he doesn't spend any time with the down and outers in this life.

That's who I hang out with because I can relate to them. This life can beat the pudding out of a person. Like that waitress who was concerned about me. She has cataracts. Can't afford the operation to fix her eyes, so she can't pass her drivers test. And she was lamenting the other day how her daughter brings in a lot of "uncles" in front of her grandkids. And on her granddaughter's last birthday this waitress heard her wish, "I wish I could be happy." The little girl had just turned four.

So as the book closes on my life, I wonder. Will I remain hopeful? I don't know. I have become convinced of one thing. I don't really know anything. Life is too complex and multi-layered. Trying to sort it out is like dealing with some kind of galaxy-sized gordian knot. Which leaves me with the only recourse of doing the best I know how in this bizarre carnival of events and trust that the Lover of my Soul will preserve me in the end. We shall see.

Under the Influence

2010-08-03T17:01:00.003-05:00

The last paintings and drawings for The Painted Soul: Photographs are almost finished. The above painting is one of the last for the book. It's an image highly influenced by the work of Maxfield Parrish. At one time, I was completely absorbed in Parrish's work. His colors are vibrant and his imagery feels so peaceful.

And somehow, it got me to thinking about why any of us create things, whether it's music or art or whatever. It's amazing how many people do love to create.

For example, when I still watched TV, I was fascinated by the show Rare Visions & Roadside Revelations. It was basically a guerrilla art road trip on steroids. These guys wandered the backwaters of America unearthing vibe-ey, sometimes kitsch, artworks created by all sorts of wonderful characters. Entertaining tales, like the guy who was in his late seventies (told by doctors when he was sixty-three that he had a few months to live) had been hauling large stones by hand to build a grotto and wall, or another ancient-looking black man painted his art on cast-off furniture, or a retired eye doctor who spent his time carving strange faces on stones he found and built a "watching wall," as I called it, along the shore of a lake. Anything that was just a little whacked as a creative expression and Rare Visions seemed to find it.

What causes this impulse to create? Is it that burning desire to bring what you did in kindergarten home to show mom, now all grown up? I do this because it helps me cope. It's a way to manage the sorrow. Sometimes it expresses the joy that I can't seem to get out any other way. It's as much a part of some people as breathing. That seems to come and go in my case.

All I know is that I'm glad, most days, that it's embedded in my emotional dna. Otherwise, I might spend my days diving into a bottle or sucking down pills or whatever. Because most of the time, living in this place makes me feel so displaced. That's why I'm always glad to touch base with people who don't feel that way. : )

Coffee at Two in the Morning

2010-07-28T23:35:00.004-05:00

Edward Hopper has a way of expressing isolation that grabbed my attention from the first time I saw his painting titled Nighthawks. A couple of days ago, I decided to explore the subject by drawing this image on black paper. While the finished piece isn't anything remarkable. I felt like it helped me to understand something about light and dark in an artwork. This is what I love about studying other painters work, especially if I set myself to trying to explore their thinking via painting or drawing. I've learned so much through the years exercising my thoughts via great painters.

Below is a 9 minute YouTube video highlighting some of his work, set to a song played by the Benny Goodman Orchestra. Enjoy!

Coffee, tea, or what?

2010-07-26T00:35:00.007-05:00

Sundays stink. Yes, I've never liked Sundays. At least not since I was in grade school. Back then extended family was part of my life. We went to church with them. Sometimes we made homemade ice cream on Sunday nights. Usually someone in my mom's family was over for Sunday dinner or we went to my grandparents.

Nowadays, Sundays are a time of reflection, rumination, and sometimes ridiculous navel gazing. Sunday sets the rest of the week. Sundays are when I'm aware of my multiplicity of defects as a human being. That's right, I don't believe in the inherent goodness of men. Sundays demand the greatest courage: am I going to try again this week or will I vegetate in a chair, waiting for time to move so far down the road that my imagination has shriveled like a raisin in the sun?

This struggle stems from holding my work and world too precious or in counterpoint, worthless. As author Annie Dillard points out in The Writing Life: "courage utterly opposes the bold hope that this (in her instance, a particular passage of her writing) the work needs it, or the world." I struggle with the ill-advised desire to have the world need my creative expressions.

So Sundays are often a day when I bounce between supplications of "please oh please, let my work be of value" and "this worthless piece of c- -p painting or song or essay needs to be torched." If I could just latch onto that place somewhere in the middle as my thoughts ricochet back and forth between extremes. What an idea.

And for some crazy reason, I continue to get up to face another disappointing week and slog through painting and music and writing — slogging along because some passage from my favorite work, Lord of the Rings, will seep into the darkness and illuminate the single thought that courage means doing what we know we're to do, regardless of the outcome.

That being the case, the above drawing I just finished is one of the last images I need for my book, The Painted Soul: Photographs.

As I've mentioned before, I don't know if any of this work is any good. But I have poured my heart and soul and will into it. And maybe that's all that matters in the end.

Then again, on nights like this Sunday night I feel much like Van Gogh observed: I put my heart and my soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process. :)

Trekkie, I'm not, but. . .

2010-07-20T20:16:00.005-05:00

When I was in my twenties, I used to hit the Racquet Club in Kirksville. The goal: work my way through a circuit of exercises on their rather primitive weight machine (by today's standards). Then it was off to spend half an hour in the sauna, purging the day via my skin, followed by a 15 minute session in the whirlpool.

On Mondays the reward at the end of the session was to find my way to Lisa's Pizza for their evening buffet and an episode of Star Trek. Hmmm. . . seems like something is amiss in this fitness routine.

Pizza and Star Trek went well together even on the projection TV Lisa's had to draw in the crowds. The projection TV was one of the first. And you had a better chance of winning at poker than gambling on when the projector would be in focus or the colors weren't going to be majorly shifted. But my wife, a friend, and I loved this Monday routine.

Those days were brought back to mind recently when I got a chance to do a commission for a friend of mine. I knew his wife loved Star Trek, so that seemed a good subject for her. So I did the above painting for them to hang in their home.

Like I said, I'm not a Trekkie, but I had a blast painting the Enterprise and creating a galactic backdrop for the ship to blaze through.

The Sand and the Sea. . .

2010-07-15T17:12:00.006-05:00

Huddled on a corner of my desk is a clutch of oddments. Stones. Shells. Service bell. More often than not, anyone wandering into my studio will impulsively press the spring-wound bell or cradle a shell or stone in their hand. Mostly, I am tolerant. Sometimes I wanna whack the dimtwit that rides the bell like an angry hotel tenant.

These objects aren't random. They are touchstones to my memory.

The shells detonate thoughts of strolls along the beaches of North Carolina's Emerald Isle. Brilliant days, overcast days, spent wallowing on the beach like a bull walrus. Night walks, watching distant lightning pops illuminate the ocean surface. Catching the eerie gleam of ghost crabs in flashlight beam as they skittered sideways across the beach. My children's joy and awe infused in their voices as they watched God's fireworks trace the horizon.

The stones are remnants of family Great Smoky Mountain camping trips. Some nights I'll palm a stone and remember. My kids mesmerized as they stirred up stone piles by the creeks, picking out the most dazzling rocks. Exploring the Pigeon River as it tumbles through mammoth boulders. The ever-so-polite Texans in a monstrous RV driving through our nearly-deserted campgrounds deciding they needed to set up camp five feet from our tent. They meant well. Felt sorry for us because we had to sleep in a tent. We just wanted them to go away. Our dread of those retirees was made vivid as the light evaporated among the trees. Dread made real when our thoughtful neighbors, without telling us, had abandoned their leftover fish fry in bags nearby. Bears and other critters rummaged through those bags just outside the tent all night. We did get a reprieve. The animal snufflings were drowned out every twenty minutes when the Texas-size RV heater kicked into a roar.

As to the service bell, it is the bell rung by customers in the service station run by my father-in-law. My wife's home town had a strong Pennsylvania Dutch community hanging onto its roots during the late '30s and '40s. And my father-in-law used to tell me stories of those "old timers." So when I see the bell or hear it, there's the spark of an image of him working the station, attired in his Standard Oil uniform, waiting on those sturdy farm folk. I can hear him unfolding his station stories: the slow times when he practiced rod 'n reel casting, the weekly Saturday night gathering on the square with the town band whoomping out some old Sousa tune. And him keeping the station open until 10:05 p.m. for the little old lady who dropped by every Saturday to have her tires checked and buy twenty-five cents worth of gas.

There's a connection in these objects. They are the past. But they are also a reminder for the present, like today. My kids and I were packed in a booth at a local restaurant. They were discussing a trip back to Emerald Isle this summer. My wife and I won't be going. Her health has taken that option off of the table for us.

But I look at these relics of our past, reminded that when we had the chance to travel, we did. We may have had to sleep in the car or bagged out along the road under the shimmering Milky Way. We also took the time to listen to the stories of my in-laws. I've passed them on to my children, who enjoy hearing them as they've gotten older. These memories are comforting ride-alongs as I progress into the next stage of my life.

And I'm reminded, too, that even with a lot of stumbling and misfires, I've tried to live out who I am, not waiting for retirement to do things. Because when we wait, we may miss our chance. Those doors opening into different parts of our life will close at some point and we never know when.

That's why when someone comes up to me and says, "Some day I'm going to do some traveling." I reply, "Do it?" Easy to say. Hard to do. But you don't want to "some day" your dream so long that the door gets hammered closed.

Become a Millionaire With Your Band

2010-06-14T22:40:00.012-05:00

It could happen to you. The key is learning the foundation techniques. It requires no special talent, just a passion for creating and playing music. Begin by having all band members put two million dollars into the band fund. If you're careful, after buying the gear, paying the venues to be able to play, and bribing people to come to the show, you can tour about a year before you're down to a million bucks a piece. Really. No kidding. Honest. I swear. : )

'If you're caught using this strategy, the secretary disavows all knowledge of your actions.'
(a paraphrase from the original Mission: Impossible TV series.)

So far the band members in Watching Judas, the band I work with, haven't figured out how to come up with the two million bucks. Me neither.

Hearts n Flowers

2010-06-12T18:22:00.007-05:00

Between erratic downpours and lightning slashes on a brooding sky, a client popped by the studio to pick up this commissioned painting — one of several projects that have hampered my posting anything new to this blog.

I know, it's a cardinal sin with blogging to be as erratic as the weather. I make no excuses, except. . .

The painting was a challenge. I thought I could knock it out in a couple of weeks. But my brain or my fingers or my eyes wouldn't cooperate. It was a full-contact sparring match for me to get it right. Part of the problem was trying to convey depth. For the longest time the painting looked like a bad tub applique. It took patience, but eventually it surrendered to my siege.

The secret to adding depth and dimension to the objects with acrylics is applying thin glazes of color. It allows each color to be suspended above the color below. When the light passes through these translucent passages, it refracts and glows in a way you can't attain by applying acrylics in a single layer. In some areas of this image, like the roses, there are no less than 8 layers of glazing. WHEW! Now, with this painting off to a new home, I'm hopeful that I can move back to more frequent posts.

Upcoming: I'm working on another commission — a galactic extravaganza. And as the painting moves along, I'll be spending interludes with my guitar to put my technique back in order. I may be the warm up guy for a concert for Watching Judas and Jenna Jackley in July.

Now what is it they say about focus? Oh yes, splashing your attention every direction is a recipe for failing. That's probably true, but my nature is to move between several disciplines. Hmmm...so that's my problem. But this tap dance between these passions keeps me thinking a bit younger. At least that's what the kids say who move in and out of my life on a daily basis, and I'm going to believe they may be right about that. Here's to remaining a kid at heart.

Some Are Just Born Afraid

2010-04-25T13:54:00.008-05:00

It's 3:30 in the morning. The wind is leaning hard on my studio door like it's blowing restlessly on a blade of grass. And the dreary night bites deep into my thoughts. I was born afraid, so afraid it kept me from my biggest dreams.

That thought washed against the silence and a memory flashed of a music biz class where I was the guest speaker. The instructor, Dr. Dudan, invited me to come talk about recording engineering. I think I was the only person he knew in the backwater town of Kirksville, Missouri that had any exposure to the entertainment industry. And that was really a big joke, because my experience was ridiculously limited. But I came to talk with these music majors, because I liked Dudan and I couldn't figure out a way to get out of the gig.

This was the last time I ever spoke about the biz. I dropped off the face of the earth. Fear is a great destabilizer. And I carried a bucket load of that with me most of my life. It's hard to shake if it's all you've known. But it is worth givin' it a shot, because it steals so many things from our lives.

The sense of this loss roars home like a night train as I googled one of the students I met from that class. I remembered her name. She and I walked out after the class was over. She was short, energetic, and had these lively kind eyes that remain etched in my memory.

Unlike most of the students in the class, she came over to talk to me about the music biz. As we walked out of class together I asked her what she wanted to do. She passionately exclaimed that she wanted to make a career in country/bluegrass music.

As we walked through the second floor corridor of Baldwin Hall, we were dodging the horde of music majors milling toward their next class. I told her I thought it was great she was going to do this, that bluegrass music was challenging and worth pursuing. As the last word fell from my mouth, I saw several of these music majors shoot us this look of contempt. They were going to go into REAL music. High brow stuff, you know.

I asked her name as we were getting ready to go separate ways. She said, "Rhonda Vincent." Then, as I turned to go down the stairs, I wished her every success. That I was excited for her.

The stairwell absorbed the last vapors of adrenaline from speaking in the class. It had been fun to have that two minute conversation with this young girl from Greentop, Missouri. I liked her instantly. But as I walked toward home, the sense of my own lack of direction began to sink in. It was frustrating to feel so afraid to chase my dream of building a career in music. But I couldn't help it. I was afraid to fail. I was afraid I wasn't good enough.

All of those things are true. Absolutely true, because I never really gave it a shot. The dream was D.O.A. because I didn't have the guts to look into the eye of failure.

So fast forward to tonight. . . Rhonda's name popped up and I clicked the link to her site. She's had a durable rewarding career. She has been deemed the Queen of Bluegrass by the Wall Street Journal. She's collaborated with great's like country icon Dolly Parton. And from what I can tell, she hasn't allowed it to spoil her. She loves her fans. She treats them with the same respect they give her. I'm proud of her. Proud that she was so focused and courageous.

Of course, this wasn't the first time I had googled her name. I'd done this a year ago. That's when I got the surprise of my life to see all that she was doing. It prompted me to write her and I received this gracious letter from Rhonda. I don't know if she really remembers me from that class. I'd like to think so. But one thing I brought away from that exchange, it's never too late to dream. Sure the dream looks a lot different when most of your life is behind you. But, as far as I know, I still have time. Even if I don't, I want to be chasing a dream than settling for gray.

That's the thought that keeps me getting out of bed every day, like today, when it's time to go mix sound for a band of young guys who think that a year is an eternity to wait for a dream to come. Sometimes I think the real reason I'm there is to help them figure out the pace. Sometimes I get crazy at their impatience, because I know it can be the thing to derail their dreams. But I'm glad to be working with them, too. It helps me keep perspective. It helps me to keep from despairing at my failures. Because I figured out that I'm not dead in the water as long as I'm still trying to swim.

Lately I've Been Listening

2010-04-16T00:56:00.007-05:00

Over the past few weeks I've been helping the pop rock electronica band I co-produced and mixed (Watching Judas) compete in the Battle of the Bands for Warped Tour. 11,000 bands fighting for somewhere around maybe 120 one-shot spots at venues around the country. I've listened to probably 400 or 500 bands over these past three weeks. Man, does that do something to your brain.

But one of the most rewarding parts of the exploration is discovering some pretty wonderful music and artists. One of them is Emily Herndon. Her group now named May Stands Still offers music that resonates with me. There's a beautiful transparency in Emily's vocals that draw a soul into the songs. Band mates Tom, Wesley, and Asha do a fabulous job of fleshing out the music. And the band is competing well in a Warped Tour dominated by screamo and metal. I'm not against these genres, but it's hopeful to see someone cut through the wall of thrash and monster guitar walls with an intimate songwriting style painted in acoustic textures and colors.

If you're not familiar with May Stands Still, go to http://www.reverbnation.com/MayStandsStill to have a listen.

P.S. Emily says they're going to release an EP sometime in May. I can hardly wait.

Why Van Gogh?

2010-03-30T02:06:00.010-05:00

Van Gogh has been somewhat of a fixation for me over the past couple of years.

What I've discovered is that by studying Van Gogh's work, I am exploring color in a new way. It has been energizing. Many of Van Gogh's paintings appeal to my own emotional landscape, so I've been reproducing them with a little bit of a spin.

I've always been fascinated by night scenes. I fell in love with Van Gogh's Starry Night when I was a freshman in high school. It was the first time I had seen the image. I didn't even see it in color. All the books in our library were pretty much black and white. But it looked so moody.

This painting was finished a few minutes ago. It's a spin on Van Gogh's The Café Terrace on the Place du Forum, Arles,at Night. The painting is part of The Painted Soul: Photographs project.

Besides his paintings, I've been reading his letters to his brother. His brother, Theo, was Van Gogh's major support throughout his life. He was always sending Vincent money to buy paints, canvas, and paper. Van Gogh tried to honor the support through working diligently to develop his art.

What struck me lately about this talented painter was that Van Gogh didn't seem aware of the idea that his brother was his best patron. He does express gratitude to Theo regularly in his letters. But I found it interesting that in one of his letters he wrote: "I cannot help it if my paintings do not sell. But the time will come when people realise that they are worth more than the cost of the paint."

He was prophetic in one sense, but in another he missed something significant. His brother thought his work was valuable. Why else would he be willing to shell out money on a regular basis to keep his brother working? Maybe it was pure love for his brother. But I'd like to imagine that it was more than brotherly love, that Theo saw the value and meaning of what Vincent was trying to do.

Van Gogh's letters have pushed me to think about my life as an artist. I have one amazing patron. My wife. She has encouraged me to paint. She has worked lots of whacked jobs to bring in the money to help support my art. She believes in the work. And I'm glad of it.

I hope you have someone in your life who has been an avid fan of your aspirations. It's an experience that's both humbling and exhilarating. : >D

I Still Hold to the Promise of Spring

2010-03-28T21:10:00.002-05:00

Mutual disrespect

2010-03-23T19:04:00.002-05:00

Lately I've been surprised by the mutual disrespect between public servants and the people they serve.

I Have Measured Out my Life by 30-Second Commercials

2010-03-20T17:41:00.004-05:00

It's true. True too many times in my life. As a melancholy soul, I tend to go way too many rounds with depression. One of the places it chases me to retreat is the BOOB TUBE. That's where the pain can be narcotized by mindless drivel. As an escape mechanism, it stinks. Stinks because when I start to pull out of that haze of commercials and cascading mindless images, the reality of my state of mind is waiting for me.

But life is more hopeful these days. Hopeful because I take a dive in that nasty electronic bath less often. I find myself more likely to pour my heart into my painting or music when the dark gets too deep. The resulting work is hit and miss. But when the work hits. . . WOW, it is exhilarating. All I had to show for a four hour vigil in front of the tube were bloodshot eyes and a spiral into a darker place.

Hmmm, then why choose the tube? It can only be summed up by admitting lack of courage. It takes courage to create in the hungering dark of this life. Not a lot of courage, but more than seems at hand in the middle of a round with depression. But it's worth choosing, because life is just too short to whizz it away with a steady drip of numbing mindlessness.

P.S. The headline for this blog was an allusion to one of my favorite poems by poet extraordinaire, T.S. Eliot. The poem: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

Creed or Chaos

2010-03-15T04:26:00.002-05:00

A society in which consumption has to be artificially stimulated in order to keep production going is a society founded on trash and waste, and such a society is a house built upon sand.

— Dorothy Sayers

Someday I'd Like to Write A Book. . .

2010-03-12T19:49:00.012-06:00

or a play, or a script, or a song.

Have you ever heard anyone make a statement like the above? I have. More than a few times.

When I was working as a writer in the entertainment biz, I often had friends and strangers confide their dream of writing a book after they found out I wrote for a living.

And after someone has seen some of my paintings or found out I was a painter, I've had tons of chances to hear the line, "I can't draw a straight line." To which my reply a lot of times was, "Neither can I. That's why I'm glad someone invented the ruler."

Through my years as a songwriter, I've had many people tell me they wished they could write a song. I've always encouraged the person to go for it.

My impression coming away from these conversations is that they think there's magic to all of this creating stuff.

The truth is, some years ago I discovered a cache of magic sand on the floor of Leonardo Da Vinci's studio. At night, when everyone else is asleep (because that's when I am at work) I put on my muse suit, pull a pinch of DaVinci sand out of a bag and hit myself in the head and PRANG! an idea leaps onto the paper or canvas. That has to be the story because when I tell them I have average talent but have just persisted in learning, they politely tell me I'm full of it.

For a long time I was mystified these people weren't going to at least give their dream a shot. Then, it finally came to me. For some, they didn't want to write a book or a song, or paint a picture. What they had in mind was this fantasy of writing a bestselling book, a hit song, or painting a masterpiece. Their real desire was to be important or famous or feel like their life had significance.

But there's another reason I've discovered over the past couple of years. It's a good reason, too. There's the fear of having a dream killed by reality. As long as a person never attempts to chase a dream, it will always remain unblemished. As long as the dream remains theoretical, it won't disappoint. They can remain in love with their dream forever because it's not real.

Seems crazy to me. Sounds too much like jumping out of a plane sans parachute believing somehow you'll be the first person to cling to a cloud and avoid the Wile E. Coyote crack up.

What can a soul do? Keep encouraging the people we meet on this whacked-out road to stay brave and go for their dream. After all, what's the worst thing that could happen?

After Eating Several People

2010-02-24T21:12:00.003-06:00

What's in the details of anything we do?

Lately, I've had a few people in my life asking that question when I've expected them to take enough pride in what they're doing to do the best they can. I don't want them slopping through the task. Their argument is that next week they're going to have to do the same task all over again, so why spend the time to do it well.

But there's something deeper at work. It has to do with the way a person looks at life. Small tasks, done well, train our minds toward excellence. It doesn't necessarily mean we will excel. But experience shows over and over that aiming for your best in life will carry you along a better path than aiming low or not taking a shot at all. But, as they say in golf, you have to groove that swing. Practice excellence until it becomes embedded.

Which brings me back to the headline of this blogspot. After eating several people was the lead in line on a paragraph written by a careless writer. What was missing? One comma. Here's the rest of the sentence with the comma in its appropriate place. After eating, several people went for a hike together on the mountain. Tell me again why the details don't matter. : >D

Would Eight Years be too Long to Work on a Project?

2010-02-21T03:52:00.010-06:00

In 2002 I torpedoed my first CD project with a West Coast entertainment company. They were willing to proceed with it, but I wasn't. It made no financial sense to me. The company was trying to help me. They were determined to get my first CD tracked. Why? Friendship.

Maybe it was for sentimental reasons. Maybe it was because the friend, and company owner, was in a place where he could afford to lose money. And it didn't seem to matter to him if we couldn't recoup the cost of recording the CD. He was comfortable with that. I wasn't.

I figured that out as he and I sat together in a Victorian-era restaurant. He was quiet. We'd just gone to the studio he was building. It was amazing. Ocean view. Pristine acoustics. Outrageous outboard gear. Fab amenities. This had been a dream we'd talked about back when we were in our 20s. Now in our 40s, he was finally realizing his dream studio. The conversation was strained as we spent our last face-time together.

Finally, he said, "I want you to finish your CD. I don't care if we only press 2 CDs. One for you and one for me. I want to have a record of your music." What could I say to that? I didn't respond.

A couple of months later he called. We talked one last time. He had told me the change in company strategy. He still wanted to do the project, but wanted to get some things established. He's a perceptive person and realized I wasn't interested. I could hear the hurt in his voice. But I also knew that I couldn't have the company spending this kind of money on my album. It would never sit right with me.

But I wanted the project to be realized. I didn't want it to cost $50,000. That's what I estimated it was going to cost the way we were working on it. So I took off on my solo path, going low-budget. After 18 months of on and off work on the CD, I came up with a record I'm proud of. It has a lot of heart in it. It's human. It's a bit rough. But it fits me. It cost me $100 to do this way and about 500 hours since I was doing it low-low-tech. Destructive editing is a tough way to go. : >D

The music isn't going to ever be popular. It's not based on catchy musical or lyrical hooks. I'm not against that kind of thing. I don't see my music as superior. It's just I'm stuck being who I am as a writer. One friend called my stuff "quirky." Another said it reminded him of art songs.

All I know is that I observe life and try to process it inside and articulate it through songwriting. I've always tried to aim for depth of thought. That's hit and miss. But whatever it is, I'm not ashamed of it.

So in the spring of 2003 I had The Painted Soul:Photographs CD finished. But it wasn't enough. Back when I was talking to the friend about the project, he had encouraged me to write some things to accompany and illuminate the lyrics and music for people.

I thought, "Okay, that's a cool idea." I just knock that out in six months and abracadabra, it will be done." Think again. Writing longer works is much harder than I imagined. For another four years I was writing and rewriting. I'm not a natural at this writing stuff. In 2007, it was time to quit working on the writing. This stuff could be worked on forever. It needed to be put to rest.

Then, over the next few months I made the decision to illustrate and illuminate the book through drawings, paintings, whatever I thought would add to The Painted Soul Project. Did it make sense? Yes. Was it prudent? I doubt it, because it's now closing in on the spring of 2010. I'm still painting and drawing and thinking and looking at the writing and music and art and feeling like it all amounts to dust.

But I did it with all my heart. It doesn't make it good art. It just means I tried to aim for something ambitious, to articulate a vision. And along the way, I continue to pray that one or two people will be able to see something worth taking away from the project.

And working on this has done its work on me. I've learned to persevere. . . man, have I learned to persevere. It has made me more thoughtful. Sometimes that's good. Sometimes. . . I think why waste my energy.

Still, I'm inclined to try to live by the words of G.K. Chesterton. He believed it was the aim of every creative person, whatever their creative gift was, to try to get it all out — to share their gift with the rest of us.

To that end, I feel like I'm close to having said everything I wanted to say creatively. But then, you never know what lurks around the next creative corner.

Have You Lost Your Childhood Wonder?

2010-02-09T18:22:00.007-06:00

They were spiraling, spinning, playfully cartwheeling against the studio window ledge. The snowflake dance outside broke the spell of the computer screen inside. I was in the middle of editing a student's paper. It was boring. The snow was calling. Four steps from the computer and I was outside.

We've got a large patio that is shared with my wife and son's piano school studio, so I began clearing the way for the next day's students. Shoveling and letting my thoughts wander.

My right shoulder is bum from football, chopping wood, detassling corn, and hundreds of other body-wearing activities. It means I have to make decisions about picking pain. It means I'm lucky, too. There are way too many people in my life who have no choice on that. They endure chronic pain whether they want to or not.

So I'm thankful I can still play this game — how much do I want to sleep tonight? After all, there's nothing like the joy of waking up every ten minutes.

Tonight, I don't care. I want to shovel snow. And as I did so, I began wondering. Have I lost the wonder of childhood? Has life beat the toys out of me?

Some days it has. Some days, I feel as old as dirt. But tonight, even with the constant gnaw of the shovel jabs to my shoulder, I am young inside. I wandered around the property reveling in the dance of flakes in the lamplights. Took photos of snow-painted trees. Took a run at the ice slick on the sidewalk and slid for a few feet. Caught snowflakes in my hands.

Five hours later, I've been in and out, drawn to the weather whenever the flakes were cascading in torrents. But it's 6:00am, the snow is gone. Time to close this studio down for the night. I'm going to limp up the stairs to bed and my mind will be at rest for the first time in a long time. I don't take it for granted. I just try to enjoy this day. It's a rare pleasant inn along the way.

Night Vigils

2010-01-30T21:09:00.004-06:00

Sometimes music inspires. Sometimes it's thought-provoking. Sometimes stirs a host of other experiences on the inner landscape. But it should never be boring. And I find the music of Imogen Heap a spark for my creativity. It's not boring. Something about the electronica, beat, and her voice that draw me into thoughtful drawing or painting.

Imogen's album Speak for Yourself has been on continual play in my studio over the past couple of days. Her lyrics aren't always satisfying for me. She often resorts to weaving together fragmented thoughts to paint an impression of the situation she's talking about. But her voice makes me feel like she's telling secrets in the dark. Suddenly, I realize she's lead me down some path and the painting or drawing I'm working on has taken an intriguing turn.

That happened with these two drawings. I started out to do traditional realism. But as the music sunk in and I submerged myself in the work, I blocked in colors I usually don't use. I left passages unrendered. The overall dark, moody atmosphere emerged. I was pleased.

Snowy, Snowy Night

2010-01-26T19:05:00.005-06:00

Working into the early hours of morning has always been my M.O. I love the solitude of my night vigil.

Like last night, when I was working on a small painting of a green pepper. My paints were spread around the palette, a battery of brushes at hand, my table easel perfectly angled, and the light splashing across the canvas. I was listening to music. Imogen Heap. Her newest album lulled me into a hypnotic concentration. At first I could hear the music perfectly. Then I submerged. Dove deeper into the details of the pepper.

When I finally surfaced, I realized I'd missed at least four songs. Outside, the wind was howling. Trees were pulsing in the dark. And as I looked closer, fine snowflakes scurried in violent spirals in front of my studio's picture window.

Even when a winter front invades, like last night, I hit the ejector button and find myself outside staring at the distant streetlights. Those lights were shimmering as snowflakes flashed like crystals in the glow. Unlike most nights, I remembered I have a camera. I broke into the studio and dug it out of a drawer like some squirrel uncovering a cache of nuts. Point and shoot. Thank goodness. My poor eyesight could never focus in this dark.

A blast of wind nearly knocked me over, so I retreated to the shelter of my studio. It was 3:17a.m. Time to lash myself back into my swivel chair. Slowly, I became aware of the music and my restlessness. Does my work go unnoticed like a 3:00a.m. snow squall? Not my place to judge. Still, it's a temptation to ask.

For now, I will trust that somewhere, someplace in time and space all the expressions of these nightly vigils with a brush or pen or guitar will find a home in someone's heart and mind besides my own.

Man of Heart and Mind. . .

2010-01-25T16:51:00.005-06:00

. . . with little time on my hands, I'm always feeling pulled between projects. It's been that way most of my adult life. Art, music, design, writing, and a host of other interests are always vying for my attention.

I wish I could be happy riding one horse, but it's not in me. So that means that larger projects, like this painting, will sit sorrowfully in a corner as I wander off into other things that capture my imagination. What is it they call people like me, Hack of all Trades or is that Jack. . . whatever the name, it all comes out the same, I have a tough time being really good at anything.

Anyway, here's the next stage of the painting. As you can see the changes become much harder to recognize, because they are subtle. I'm still playing Tap Dance Jimmy with the color and lighting. My wife has been in the studio several times shooting a glance toward the painting. So far, I'm not successful in sparking her imagination with it, because she hasn't commented on it. That's a bad sign. But it's helpful. Makes me return to push paint around the canvas in search of the lost mystery.

Hopefully, I will find the final touchpoint to this painting in the next session at the easel.

In the meantime, thanks for following along on this journey that I usually take all by myself.

Cheers!

It's Not Like I'm Lounging Around

2010-01-18T16:31:00.005-06:00

Some might think I've been lying around, watching the tube, YouTube, or burying my soul in mindless sports. I haven't. Okay maybe watched some mindless sports while I paint. : >D

So I put this composite of items that have been near and dear to my artistic vision over the past few weeks. I've been making myself paint one painting a day five days a week. May seem easy, but with my painting style and the sheer weight of the emotional landscape I deal with daily, well, that's a pretty ambitious goal. I've had a couple of days when it's been impossible to do because of my obligations to people. But overall it's coming along nicely.

With that in mind, I will be starting another blog that will be very straightforward. It will be posts of these one day paintings. And they will be put up for auction on eBay as I post them to the other blog. The second blog is titled This Visual Feast. And I hope over time my paintings will prove to be just that, a visual feast. These will be small paintings offering a chance for me to explore a simpler subject than some of the larger, more involved paintings that can take several weeks for me to complete.

I hope you will join me over there, too. And I hope you will support the work. By auctioning them on eBay, you have a chance to pick up some original art for a reasonable price. Okay, that's the end of the sales pitch. Now I have to move on to the day's work. Cheers!

Long and Winding Road

2010-01-13T21:41:00.004-06:00

Trying to bring this image up to a level where it starts making sense is always a long process for me. My explanation is simply that I'm not a natural at this. I have to work extremely intensely to come up with a final painting that looks like something I can live with on my wall or someone else's.

In this instance, I've continued to glaze in colors. Sometimes I have to wipe the glaze out before it dries, because it just doesn't work. Along the right edge of the mirror is a glaze of blue. I'm still trying to decide if it works. I won't make that decision until the painting is further along in development.

If you look at the previous stage of the painting, you can see how things have begun to solidify. I've blocked in more detail, refined some of the tones and colors.

This is the first time I've ever painted candlelight, so it's been a learning experience. Id like it to have a nice effect in the picture, but not quite sure yet how to make it look the way I imagine in my head.

By the next stage, you should see some things brought to a high finish as I work out the overall feel of the painting.

For your info, this painting is going to be used on a handmade book I've written. Right now, I'm learning the Coptic bookbinding technique. I had no intention of doing so, but I can't afford to have a professional bookbinder handle this part of the project.

I'm going to start another blog very soon titled "This Visual Feast." It will document those little paintings I'm doing right now. Thought it would be good to separate that project from this blog which has a broader scope.

In the meantime, hang in there with your life. : >)

Turn to the Dark Side

2009-12-31T04:01:00.004-06:00

As the painting progresses, I focus on establishing the darker passages of the work. Trying to keep it from getting dull and lifeless, I build these areas up with thin glazes. It's still very rough, but I'm starting to feel confident the final painting has hopes of being successful.

Experiment in Vitamin C-minor

2009-12-21T03:13:00.006-06:00

There's something magical about sun through a glass. It's even more so when I see how light gets refracted through a drink. In this instance, the glass contained a mix of cranberry and some powdered health mix. Just had to explore the subject with pen and ink and a little Prismacolor® pencil for added sparkle.

The Three Amigos`

2009-12-18T04:29:00.006-06:00

Three Amigos
7" x 5" • acrylic on panel

Getting ramped up for the new year, I pushed myself to do this painting in a day. It's a good discipline. And in 2010, I'm planning to put this type of painting at auction on eBay. At least one a week will be posted to auction.

I'm pleased with how this one came out. I'm learning to glaze in lots of layers of color to get the effect I want. The green pears were REALLY green outside and in. : >D

Finding the Light

2009-12-18T03:38:00.004-06:00

It's been busy, as it is for everyone else, but I've slid some time in for the painting. The lighting is closer to what I'm looking for in this image. It goes slow. I'm attempting to build the kind of lighting found in some of the Old Masters paintings.

In my art history classes they talked about paintings and artists who use this lighting labeled chiaruscuro. It's a technique these painters used to create a dramatic effect. They did this by painting a dark, sometimes silhouette, objects or figures in the foreground with strong lighting dominating the middle ground. Two of my favorite paintings using this type of lighting are Vermeer's enigmatic Allegory of Painting and Rembrandt's powerful The Risen Christ at Emmaus.

If you'd like to read a pretty good article explaining chiaruscuro with some nice examples of paintings that use this lighting technique, go to emtpyeasel for a quick read.

Takin' it to the Next Step

2009-12-11T04:15:00.003-06:00

For the next phase I try to block in the lights and darks more. Then I push some initial colors in here and there to see if the lighting will work. This is still rugged, but it has taken me awhile to push it to this place. I'm still not certain of the color scheme, and still defining the figures and some of the candles.

The next phase should start solidifying the image. But it always feels like a roll of the dice with acrylics. They dry quickly. Sometimes that's aggravating when I'm trying to model an object so that the illusion of three dimensions is believable. Who knows, I may yet move back to oils for their slower drying times and the way they blend.

Building an Image

2009-12-06T02:33:00.003-06:00

In all of my years of painting, I've found myself rotating between approaches. Sometimes I paint a direct image "alla prima" — just blocking it in and letting the chips fall where they may. Or I may begin with a detailed drawing, or I will paint a detailed underpainting in raw umber or cobalt and umber, depending on the image. Lately, because of eyesight problems, I've returned to the underpainting approach. It helps me to work out the structure of light and tone and image placement.

Thought you might like to see the development of a painting this way, so I'll be posting photos of the painting as it progresses. Should be interesting for both of us to observe. Cheers! : >D

Study in Light and Color

2009-12-01T18:36:00.005-06:00

She Rocks and Watches
approx. 11" x 8.5" • acrylic on paper

Created for The Painted Soul book, I wanted to experiment with light and color. The model is my wife. But I wasn't trying to get an exact likeness. I was more interested in seeing how warm colors and bright light influence the feel of a work.

The Painted Soul

2009-11-24T14:41:00.004-06:00

Self-portrait
approx. 11" x 8.5" • acrylic on canvas

"A man in search of his identity is traveling the wrong road."
— William Kirk Kilpatrick

Night Vision at Devil's Backbone

2009-11-20T20:59:00.004-06:00

Deep Romance
approx. 11" x 8.5" • mixed media on paper

Inspiration will hit so often when I get a chance to wander in the country under a night sky. The following is an excerpt sparked by a camping trip to Backbone State Park in northeast Iowa.

. . .I remember that night and I grow restless. The thought of such extravagant romance is unnerving. For surely it's romance that infused the heavens with glory. Deep romance in the Incarnation.

I grow old and tired. The Bridegroom, younger than we, never tires of the romance. He is forever Light. And the vision of who we shall become resides in Him.
—excerpt from The Painted Soul: Photographs

Snow Squall

2009-11-14T18:32:00.003-06:00

Winter Tomb
approx. 6" x 5" • pen and ink

Winters where the tail end of South Henry Street became ours. The street we neighbor boys shared grudgingly with cars when we biked in the summer. The street we could now sled unabated as those metal beasts silently eyed us from their frozen snow tombs at the curb. I would stare back suspiciously, especially after a frantic piece of sledwork to escape crumpling my body on one of their bumpers.

— excerpt from The Painted Soul:Photographs

Requeim for a Lightweight

2009-11-12T14:02:00.004-06:00

Abandoned Dreams
approx. 5" x 6" • pen and ink

A flash of pale yellow detonated among the dying thistles — goldfinches heading for cover. A roadwork sawhorse with a blinded warning eye was trapped, half-submerged in the elbow of the creek bed. A dented beer can bobbed in a playful circle, corralled by the sawhorse legs. I took aim with a stone, fired, just missing. The can wobbled violently in place, then continued its maddening dance. I didn’t have the heart to try again.

Under cover of the bridge, I heel-kicked a few puffs of dust as I headed north up the trail. North, past the now plum-purple tree standing by the casino parking lot. The tree where the mockingbird Rocky, as my daughters named him, had held sparrows spell-bound by clever mimics a few years ago. I stopped, slowly pulled back a branch to see if I could find one of Rocky’s descendants hiding. Only an abandoned nest clung pitifully in the crotch of a limb, eroding, lop-sided.
— excerpt from The Painted Soul: Photographs

Ezra

2009-11-09T21:46:00.003-06:00

Ezra
11" x 8.5" • pen and sepia ink

Then Ezra withdrew from before the house of God and went. . . neither eating bread nor drinking water for he was mourning over the faithlessness of the exiles. — Ezra 10:6

When you listen to moody music too long

2009-11-06T22:57:00.004-06:00

Faithless Times
11" x 8.5 " • prismacolor® on black pastel paper

Discovered a station in iTunes that mesmerizes me as I paint and draw. It's called Cinemix. They play movie soundtracks. Lots I've never heard. This drawing idea fell into place while listening to atmospheric sorrow-filled tracks. Fitting since this drawing accompanies a piece of my writing dealing with the failures of the soul. It's a theme I am all too familiar with in my life.

In January (fingers crossed), the book will be available at one of the online book places like Blurb. Then you can read the piece that sparked this idea.

: >D

Trapped in a Herman Melville Novel

2009-11-03T21:38:00.013-06:00

Have you heard of Herman Melville? He's the author of the classic tale, Moby Dick. The story unfolds with Captain Ahab obsessed with a giant white whale. I'm beginning to think I've landed in his predicament.

Like Ahab, I sometimes feel obsessed with my own elusive white whale. It's kept me from posting any paintings related to my aims as a painter. This monster project, The Painted Soul: Photographs is my seemingly-forever wild hunt.

It's going on seven years of hammering, sawing, tearing down, and rebuilding the concept. And like any good project, I've made a guzzillion trips to the store trying to find that right tool or material to make the finished work look as beautiful and effortless as possible.

When I step back to see how things are going, I have these ambiguous, sometimes indifferent, thoughts and feelings about how it's turning out. My wife reminds me I've lived with this too long, and I'm too close to it. That's somewhat of a relief and also sparks fear that the past seven years have been a wash.

And somewhere in the back of my mind, I recall this passage from some C.S. Lewis book. He encourages any author to do a small idea well than to do a big idea poorly. That's a palm-sweat reality I'd rather not entertain.

In my defense, I had this tiny idea in mind. But as it developed, it took over my imagination and wouldn't let go.

For your fun or torment, I offer these drawings as fragments of the thought process I go through as I sling ink around the pages of the book. This book that was to be words on a page. Now I've splashed acrylics, inks, graphite, pastels, and a whole host of other media among the pages. From my estimation, these drawings are put to page nearer to the end of this journey than to the beginning.

That's hopeful. : >)

In the Spire of a Church Tower

2009-10-25T19:55:00.008-05:00

Church Tower
11" x 8.5" • acrylic on watercolor paper

One of the greatest challenges I've faced as a painter is to create some mood in a painting other than cool or unattached. I'd like to be better at creating a wider range of the human emotion. For some artists, this is easy. And it's where I see the limits of my talent. : >D

Gerald Walker is a friend whose work is mostly from his imagination. He can create moody skies, dramatic lighting that carves the human form out of deep shadows. He loves sci-fi, so his skills lend themselves to his choice of subject matter. He inspires me to keep trying.

That's why I took a run at painting a night shot. In Church Tower, I attempted to build a somber sky by doing an underpainting using black and white. Then I used glazes of Prussian blue and cobalt to bring the sky to life. My resource for this painting was a 2:00 pm, broad daylight, cloudless shot of a church near my house, so I got a chance to transform the cheeriness of that photo into this night scene.

Love Came to My Door

2009-10-18T12:51:00.005-05:00

Joni
acrylic on board

Falling in love with an idea can be absurd. I've done it. Here's what I mean. When I was in my 20s, I fell in love with Joni Mitchell's music, would put her Blue album or Court and Spark on continuous play.

As I let the music wash over me, thoughts of what Joni must be like began to form. I'd imagine her perched on a rock along some celestial shore. Her serene beauty and provocative observations danced in harmony in this hypnotic vision. It had happened. I fell in love with the imagined Joni.

If you think you've never done this sort of imaginative imaging, let me ask if this doesn't happen at some level when you tell your side of a story?

: >D

I saw the documentary "Woman of Heart and Mind" a couple of years ago and my painting of Joni was exploded. Her life. Her loves. Her world. It was a vivid reality check.

Still. . . I love her music. It influenced my own songwriting. I owe her a huge debt of gratitude for firing my imagination and giving me a sense of what good art should look like. I wish her the best, that she will find her way in the days she has left.

Global Warming

2009-10-13T02:35:00.006-05:00

Global Warming
7" x 5" • acrylic on canvas

Christmas presents from my young children could be highly entertaining. One year I got a yogurt container with a golf ball and rock enclosed. Another year, one of them gave me a doll and seashell.

I've kept nearly all of these treasures because they do bring warm thoughts of a distant time when my children were under foot. Under foot, reminding me not to get so focused on my life that I can't stop to look at the world around me.

And tonight I took some time to take a closer look at this tiny lighthouse and sea-in-a-globe. Never tried this type of object. It was tough. Painting it to look like a globe. Hmmm...let's just say I wasn't having a good time. But it was a good challenge. I learned something.

Painting: More Than Just Image Copying

2009-10-12T17:36:00.012-05:00

Caught in the Lines
11" x 8.5" • acrylic on watercolor paper

Finished this morning at 7:00 a.m. Below are the accompanying lyrics to this image from The Painted Soul: Photographs project.

BRIDE
© michael barfield 2006

Images cascade
down pages of gray,
Shadows of yesterday
haunt every day of her life. . .
Waking dreams.

Transfixed by the mirror,
she grieves at what she sees.
Like a rose in later summer,
whose beauty has faded away. . .
Failing light.

But down in the Garden,
across the face of time.
Her lover is calling her
to be His own.

In the spire of a church tower,
the bells have all ceased,
As a pale shrouded figure
falls to her knees and cries.
Faithless times.

But down in the Garden,
across the face of time.
Her lover is calling her
to be His own.

And caught in the lines
she's had worn on her face.
The mystery of loving
and living in this place of broken dreams. . .
He will remake.

It's Wagon's Ho!!!

2009-10-01T18:50:00.003-05:00

Wagon's Ho!
7" x 5" • acrylic on board

This piece of pottery comes from Japan. Made back before World War II, I know, because my mother-in-law printed the following on the bottom of this pottery: "a gift to me as a little girl - Lois Price." Since Lois was born in 1921, she must've received it in the late '20s.

On the side of the wagon canopy are the words "Out Where The West Begins." Even in the early days we had our imports.

I've always enjoyed looking at this little piece. It's just shy of 6" in length and it looks like the wheels and reins were hand-painted.

Lost in Memories. . . maybe

2009-09-27T03:19:00.008-05:00

Pigeon River - Leaf Season II

24" x 26" - acrylic on canvas

It's been a real haul the past three weeks with our move to a new place, so the blog has languished. But I'm nearly settled in a new studio space. This painting came out of it. I had blocked in the basic structure of the painting nearly nine years ago. In between, I lost the resource photo I was using to give me an idea of what the place looked like.

Two days ago, after unpacking my paints, I decided to go ahead and try to finish the painting. I wanted to capture the feel of the place, especially since it has such a distinct atmosphere.

The time of year was early fall in the Smokies. The leaves were just turning. My children were little. It was important to expose them to the park. To let it work it's power on them as it has on me through the years.

This part of the Pigeon River is a massive tumbling of boulders, rocks and stones, with a shallow flow of water weaving among this maze of silence.

The kids loved it. They got quiet the longer they lingered in this silent landscape. It was a joy to see how the landscape worked on them as it has on me through the years. It seems to have given them a deep appreciation for the land, even though they were raised in an urban environment.

Don't know how this painting hits you, but this piece of landscape always projects a melancholy feel. The entire Smoky Mountain Park affects me that way to some extent. As I meditate on the landscape I feel as if I'm seeing the tail end of their glory tumbling down from some indeterminate height. Cast down like some glory lost as the land succumbs to age. That impression affects my color choices. . . the muted grays, the subtle color, and the diffusive light.

Next week I hope to get back to my series of small paintings. Thanks for tagging along.

Cheap Donuts Anyone?

2009-09-10T13:23:00.008-05:00

Cheap Donuts
7" x 5" (17.5cm x 12.5cm) - acrylic on panel

Yes, they're those nasty little donuts that make you feel like you inhaled a cloud of sugar-dust. Not great fun eating. But they are an interesting subject to paint - especially when you set them on a sleek bed of aluminum foil.

Now I'm sounding like a writer of catalog copy. Enough.

What was particularly fascinating for me was to convey the difference in the texture of powdered donuts and foil. It's not as easy as you think. Look at how close the value range is between them.

All you need now is some tarwater coffee to wash these babies down.

Woodpicker or Woodpecker?

2009-09-03T14:10:00.001-05:00

Woodpecker Toothpick Dispenser
7" x 5" (17.5cm x 12.5cm) - acrylic on panel

This quirky little dispenser sat on some table in my wife's extended family for every meal. Somewhere along the way my wife's parents inherited this little contraption. I'm trying to imagine the person who thought this was the perfect decor for any dining experience.

I have to admit, it is clever. The woodpecker is on a spring that allows it to be pushed down into the hollowed-out log. The beak is designed so that when you push it into a pile of toothpicks it will latch onto one. As you release the bird, it rocks back into start position to offer you a single toothpick.

We've kept this in the family because my wife's mom gave it to one of my sons for Christmas when he was a little boy. She had Alzheimers at the time, so mistook the woodpecker for a toy.

Glad to have it, because it reminds me that even when she was ill, she thought of others. That's how she was the entire 28 years I had the privilege of knowing her. She spoiled me rotten. : >D

In a pickle. . . server.

2009-08-31T17:05:00.000-05:00

Pickle Server

7" x 5" (17.5cm x 12.5cm) - acrylic on panel

While I was working on this painting of a pickle serving jar, it got me to thinking of what kind of culture would serve ordinary pickles in such an elegant container.

This server has a silver-plated lid and pickle tongs. There is a beautiful bit of pattern etched into the lid. The end of the tongs are not only functional but decorative. There's even a nice design where they meant for you to grab the tongs.

In our age of cold utilitarianism, this object reminds me of what we may have lost in the exchange.

Seems to me that to house pickles in such an extravagant glass hinted at how the simple things in life were treasured. Entertaining friends. Savoring something so commonplace as to swaddle it in beauty.

There's a habit of mundane consumerism so wrapped in our current culture. We consume without thought or at best, maybe a "I gotta' get this done so I can move on to the next thing." We're amusing ourselves to death and loving it less.

All it takes is a trip to the mall to see how few smiles there are to go around. Our society seems to have more of everything than could possibly be imagined by the folks who used this glassware.

I think I'll go sit at the kitchen table and eat a home-grown tomato. Maybe use a fancy fork and knife to serve it up. And most importantly, slow down, enjoy the experience before I chop out for the next item on my to-do list. : >D

The House on Maple Street

2009-08-29T12:01:00.001-05:00

Maple Street Memories
7" x 5" (17.5cm x 12.5cm) - acrylic on panel

Some time back my uncle asked if I'd do a painting of the house where his wife and my mom grew up. It's also where I spent the first two years of my life, in the southeast Iowa town of Centerville. All of the older kids in my mom's family have fond memories of going to school there, their friends, and the relatively uncomplicated life they lived.

For that reason, I tried to make more of an impression of the place. The photo I worked from was somber and dull. I wanted the scene to feel full of light, soft cheery light. I'm hoping it will be what he was looking for as his present to my aunt.

Experimental Painting with Peach and Pitcher

2009-08-28T18:22:00.000-05:00

Peach and Pitcher
5" x 7" (12.5cm x 17.5cm) - acrylic on panel

I experimented this week with acrylics a bit. Tried approaching the painting with a little different technique than my usual. Most of the time I do a detailed underpainting in raw umber, then glaze thin layers over the top, like in the previous paintings I've posted.

This time around I took a more direct approach by splashing thick layers of paint. I still have layered like crazy on this one because acrylics tend to have a flat look to them. Glazing adds some pizzazz to the images, giving it a bit more of a translucent effect of each color layer peeking through the glazed layers above it.

Stabilizing Influences

2009-08-28T18:03:00.000-05:00

Gyro Life
5" x 7" (12.5cm x 17.5cm) - acrylic on panel

This week has been a retrospective. We will be vacating our home in a couple of weeks. Not by choice, as you may know. The upheaval pushes thoughts a specific direction, as I do this mad scramble to tie up the loose ends of a lot of little projects.

As I was working on this, I looked out the window at the neighborhood. Pleasant. Quiet. Next to the window ledge sat this little gyroscope, a remnant of my wife's childhood. Thought about what a wonderful place this has been and how stabilizing it has been for my wife since she has dealt with an illness that keeps her home bound a lot more than she'd like.

So I placed the gyroscope on the ledge to put this scene together. Notice the coolness of outside and the warmth of the incandescents that illuminated the interior.

This was cathartic.

Drink From the Silver Cup

2009-08-20T14:07:00.001-05:00

Silver Cup
5" x 7" (12.5cm x 17.5cm) - acrylic on panel

We've had this cup since the '70s. It belonged to my wife's grandmother. I was drawn to it because of it's tarnished look. I'd heard that if you don't keep silver polished the air will eventually oxidize it til there's nothing left of the silver plating. I like the idea. It's a metaphor for living. Most of us hit the atmosphere pristine. Over time we're not so shiny and new. Life does a fine job of beating the toys out of us.

That may seem dark. But when I look at this tarnished cup, I see character. It appeals to me because it's got lots of complexity to its surface. Reminds me of those friends I'm privileged to know who have been through the fire. They're beaten up. But inside that old tarnished vessel is this person of great strength, character, and grace.

BTW, the reflection in the glass behind the cup is me.I look a bit beat up and tarnished, but I hope gathering some of that grace and character I mention in the previous paragraph. : >D

Beach House Grilling - the sequel

2009-08-19T22:14:00.000-05:00

What Will She Choose?
30" x 40" - acrylic

The story continues. I had another encounter with the guy who was amused I would waste my time creating a painting of a gas station. (check my August 8th post for details.) His daughter likes one of my paintings. He hinted I should offer it as a wedding gift to her. Interesting.

He didn't ask the price of the painting. I suppose the $3000 price tag and a month of my life to paint it wouldn't discourage his "hint."

Still I can't imagine him spending a month of his salary as a wedding present. But what else could I expect?

Okay, what I'd like on my wishlist would be more people who appreciated my paintings. : >D

Bank Lady

2009-08-16T01:29:00.000-05:00

acrylic on canvas board
5" x 7" (12.5 cm x 17.5 cm)

This old bank was among the items we discovered while going through my in-laws home. They used to collect lots of odds n ends. In fact, when we had to sort their lives out after their passing, I couldn't believe how many things they had squirrelled away. They designed and built their home back in the '50s and I was absolutely stunned at the number of drawers they had built into this house. Every time I thought my wife and I were through sorting, we'd stumble across another cache of items buried in some drawer that, in 30-some years of visiting them, we never noticed.

The Beach House Grill in the mountains.

2009-08-09T01:11:00.000-05:00

This past week I've been thinking about the blog and realized I haven't really given you an idea of what my painting style looks like. So tonight I'm posting an image of a recent large painting titled "Beach House Grill." It's 34" x 23", so it's a bit difficult to see the detail. But I can assure you, there's a lot of detail in it. : >D

The response to this "gas station painting" has been mixed.

Some friends took a two-second look, said, "Cool," then spun the conversation toward baseball or candy or their Nintendo, as they herded me to another room to get away from it.

One woman came into my living room, saw the painting, stared at it, walked up close, then back, commented on the colors, and mustered the courage to ask, "Why a gas station." And we had a nice conversation about painting and ideas and the why of it.

Another guy came in, gawked, gave his wife a sideways glance and said, "What's with the BP station? It's a gas station. Why waste your time?" I could hear those rusty gears clanking in his brain. It didn't make sense to him. And if it didn't pass his internal logic, I was an idiot for painting it. So it was a no-brainer for me to weave some tale of how I had spent the better part of an hour hurling in the BP station bathroom and wanted to memoralize it in a picture.

So it can be risky for the ego, this being a painter in the early 21st century. But it always has been. Yet, like a lot of folks, I can't resist the need to make my ideas come to life in paint.

And for this blog, I'll be tackling these intimate little paintings based on old toys and art glass. Stay tuned.

Square Pegs, Round Holes

2009-07-31T14:39:00.000-05:00

So the company I worked for put me up for adoption back in 2007. They said, "We love you. No, really, we do. It's not you. It's us." But the bottom line was they wanted to do something different. Wanted younger. But you can't say that in these "warm and creamy" times.

And in retrospect, I'm glad they put me on the curb. But at first, it was that miserable sitting-in-the-dark-listening-to-Carole-King records, paralyzed, tempted to take up smoking.

It did prompt me to ask, "what do I want to do with the rest of my life?"

The answer, in part, to that question is connected to this blog. The thing that turned the deal for me to commit to this was stacking Seth Godin's ideas (yes, I do enjoy his work, and I get no commission for promoting it.) on top of some of what I've read of Chris Guillebeau's blog posts. It's that thing of not putting your life in a box. To be unwilling to settle. Chris talks about that a lot on his blog.

One piece of advice by Chris for the person who wants to live an unremarkable life:

Sit at a desk 40 hours a week for an average of 10 hours of productive work. One day, the corner cubicle will be all yours. Until then, get really good at Minesweeper. Read every article on CNN.com every day. Attend useless meetings.

This guy is somewhat of a kindred spirit. I've spent my entire professional life trying to find ways to make those days at work mean more. My friends have chided or cheered my efforts along that line. That desire to chase more than "a name on the door on the 33rd floor in the air"* is challenging. But it's what has me moving to the next stage of life with a new project.

That brings me to the title of my blogspot, Nap Dreams. I like to go sit at fast food restaurants. I like to go there to read and think. One of the ways I do that thinking is by doodling on napkins. Doodle my big dreams out there in some concrete way.

Now to take that doodling to the next level. To turn those napkin doodles into a more realized form.

THE PLAN: Pack up all of my different creative expressions and put them on a flight through the blogosphere. To keep myself disciplined, my aim will be to make weekly stops along the way to drop off an image of one painting I've done during that particular week. But I will also be recording one of my own songs every week, as well, and provide a link where you can go to have a listen.

Of course, you may find a doodle or two posted in between when the idea seems to need blogspace.

So there you have it, a commitment to create music, art, and writing that I hope you will be able to relate to in your week. I'm sure this will be a rough ride at times with lots of turbulence. But I hope the view will be worth the ride.

When does it begin? You'll have to tune in again. I'm still working on the flight schedule and trying to put a bunch of projects to bed.

*Quote from Joni Mitchell's song "The Arrangement."

Seth Godin Ruined My Life

2009-07-24T01:03:00.001-05:00

There I was, minding my own business. Stumbling through my reality as an artist, mesmerized by my mantra: "I just wanna' paint, draw, 'n play music." Maybe spit out the back door every now and then. Happy. Ignorant. Expecting little.

Then Seth Godin came riding into town. Riding on his purple cow. Riding in with his big ideas about marketing.

He was saying crazy stuff. And next thing I know I'm reading his books and using his blog as my visualizer for my screensaver. Mainlining his ideas every day. And I'm seeing the possibilities for excellence in places I never expected.

Now I'm finding myself saying things like, "Hey, that's not 'permission marketing.'" as I make quote slashes like a poor imitation of Chris Farley's SNL editorial guy.

Or when I'm going through a rough spot in my professional life, I spout out, "Hey this is just 'The Dip' Seth Godin talks about in his book." And I make that stupid quotation gesture right out there in the Taco Bell/KFC in front of God and everybody.

That's what got me doing this blog. That Godin guy with his theories and ideas and common sense. Got me lashing myself to my easel, or shackled to my guitar, with the aim to build something "remarkable." (See that quotation impulse again?)

Got me thinking: take a shot at your dream. He makes it look tempting to do because he has these ideas. He even makes you think you might be able to do something cool.

Still. My problem. I'm not Seth Godin. He's really smart. I think he was genetically engineered to think marketing and business.

But I'm crazy enough to chase some of his ideas. Crazy enough to fly this dream of mine straight into the cliff face because I believe this idea is worth doing. At least that's what Seth Godin has me believing.

So now you have the motivation behind my blog. Stay tuned next week to see the destination this departing flight will take off for in the future.

Realizations

2009-07-18T17:59:00.000-05:00

It is humbling to be almost good at several things and be painfully aware of it.

This BLOG will amaze. . .

2009-07-17T18:06:00.000-05:00

Okay, maybe not amaze, but I've been percolating some ideas for a long time. How do I connect with others who enjoy thinking, looking, and experiencing the arts? The answer: a weekly blog.

Already, I'm out of the box with an unimaginative idea. But bear with me. I plan to offer something that will be worth visiting. That may even end up being imaginative.

Stay tuned for upcoming posts that explain the BLOG in depth. When it will begin. What it will contain. Film at 11:00. Cheers! The Painted Soul