The ghost of Van Gogh

I have to confess, probably my favorite painter in the world is Vincent Van Gogh. I love the liveliness of his lines and the freedom of his palette. I love the fact that he decided not to paint anything until he had mastered drawing. I love the fact that he wrote long letters to his brother Theo with little pictures drawn on the side - and that we still have them. And i love his daring, and love of craft, persisting in the face of utter non-acceptance of his vision. (As many of us may or may not know, he sold no paintings before his death.)

Van Gogh was the ultimate visionary, mastering a craft and expressing what he saw with such taste and exquisite sensitivity that it took our eyes 100 or so years to comprehend the beauty of it. Now his collections create stirs wherever they go: he is a posthumous rock star, with new kinds of lively lines - lines of people waiting to see his collections at museums compiling his works, as we witnessed most recently at the Met - (of NYC).

What most of us know all too well is that he cut his ear off. In fact, i wonder if we remember much else about him in the popular mind. That's just a quirk of human information processing: if it's shocking, we tend to remember it.

Anyway, i suppose, as one who has discovered the virtues of art, I have a fear of its dangers. If i dare to dream and set down my dreams, will i, too, die penniless and misunderstood? My sensible side says this is just such a drama; but some other side is not so sure. I suppose the courage of art is to step into the void and deliver something forth, without concern for the likeability of the outcome. How do artists weigh this against financial obligations? It's a mystery. But as i was recently reminded, Tolstoy had 13 children - and he wrote War and Peace. I wonder what his wife did. Hmmm.

Confessions, light

I have a confession to make, which is pretty silly from the outset since i'm speaking to the ethers. But this is it: i just have this longing to be of service. Everybody has their own idea of what that looks like, feels like, i suppose. Mine relates to serving what i can only refer to as the greater "Plan" - that is, helping people remember that they are sacred, that the world is sacred, and to begin behaving as such.

But whenever i get started to speak to that issue in a live setting, i'm like a deer in the headlights. It's as if the thousands of words all rearrange themselves somewhere just inside the tip of my tongue, and my brain dissolves. Sad, true. So I've learned to serve in more oblique ways - I've helped the poor, and raised children, and participated on non-profit boards, and worked in toxic corporations to turn them around, and walked out on nature's trails to appreciate her. Still the demon presses me on. Sometimes i've tried too hard, and neglected my children - well, at least in comparison to all those sweet moms out there who do the wonderful little things to let their kids know they're thinking of them.

But still, i wonder if i'll ever have the feeling of YES - I did that great thing, or YES, i've made my contribution. I hope that, with time, all these internal fires will sort themselves out, and I will wear down into something fitting, like a nice old pair of jeans, that the spirit can use well.

In praise of art

Maybe i'm the last one to the party, but for the past few years, i've been obsessed by art: appreciation, craft, styles, history - the works. It seemed that everything i ever wanted to know or understand about life was encoded in a work of art. The myths, for instance, which were just stories in my childhood, taught me very elegantly about psychological forces: naivete, love, lust, power, changeability, order, fulfillment.

I left a desk job after 9-11 to pursue art. I didn't really care which kind, i just needed it, more than coffee. I was out of strength, out of courage, out of ideas, out of energy, and certainly out of joy. Living amidst thousands of mourning people, and dozens of burning manholes, and police vigilance against perceived further threats, was fundamentally exhausting.

On my first day of class, my painting teacher taught us to simply enjoy mixing oil paints with the spirits and stand oil on our pallettes. Basic stuff. What a wonderful, oozy feeling just to tease the palette knife around, waiting for the right consistency. White became off-white, and sand, and putty, and taupe. We used big clumsy brushes to capture, for the first time ever, some perspective on a seated skeleton. As one who so often rushed from project to project, I was drawn wondrously into the land of the slow. I had to stop, and notice, how DID that spinal vertebrae hook up with the rib? And how big was the pelvis compared to the rib cage? And how, exactly, did that bony hand bend at the wrist? How did the colors of the bones change subtly, according to placement and breaks of light, so that i, too, could convey their movement through space? The order, the proportion, the orchestration and symmetry gave me a surprisingly strong jolt of appreciation for the loveliness of the human form. And this was before skin! And the light! Wow! To notice the fall and shift of light and shadow! What a wondrous world! I painted and noticed. I noticed again, that all these bones needed to exist in a context. Where was the horizon line? What was the true background? What artistic license could i bring in to set these lovely bones in a useful context? What color, what depth, might show off this frail new friend? Where did those three hours go, i wondered?

Since that first class, I've been as obnoxious as a religious convert, noticing and experimenting with all the arts. Drawing taught me about shadow and subtleties of expression. Mosaic taught me about putting pieces together - a great idea after things in life have broken. Drama taught me about the flow of feeling, and the build and release of tension. Stories taught me about how fundamentally we need and benefit from scripts.

I used to think that the divine was somewhere else. Now, art has taught me that i am surrounded by a dazzling array of wisdom and beauty, if i will only slow down to take part.

The view from Woodstock

I live in Woodstock, New York, which is one of the most beautiful places around. Poised between the heights of the Catskill Mountains and the depths of the Hudson River, it is a charming hamlet populated with characters of every stripe. There are scholars, like the Thurmans; and celebrities. There are famed writers and intellectual pioneers. There are musicians and village knitters. And there are meadows, springs, ferns, and ancient sacred sites. I'm pretty sure there are fairies.

What many don't realize is that Woodstock is not the site of the famed concert; it was only planned here. This is a place where artists, utopians, religious figures and healers have congregated for thousands of years. This is a place where people have mountain top experiences.

I value living in the place where so many people sounded the dawn of the Aquarian Age in a daring breakthrough of art, aspiration, and plain old Dyonisian wildness. Imagine, now, that tens of thousands of people found their way before the days of the internet, to an amazing, one of a kind "happening." I think we could use a few more of those. Not just the same thing, but something - collective.

It's been forty years since that great event, and the town of Woodstock looks like a strange anachronism: known for its burst of modernity, it seems comically frozen in a flower-power vignette, complete with tye-dye, windchimes, and cute candles. Many of the original ideals faded, replaced by corruption, or just exhaustion. The hippies, when they show up, do look a bit tired. The weirdest part to my eyes are the children, so avant garde before their time. And yet.

I live in a town where the two "supermarkets" are organic ones, and i have to leave town to find candybars or fast food. I live in a town that has two hardware stores and no department stores. I like that. I live in a town where people of all ages come together on Sunday afternoons and drum in the village square. There are extra instruments - rattles or shakers - for little tikes that may not have known the ritual. Everyone gets something.

At a time when corporate pillaging has peaked, perhaps a little village like this, with a bit of dusting, could regain its star status. Even mavericks have to make succession plans. I wonder, what will the younger generation do? What will we do with this legacy? Can iconoclasts have traditions? We'll see.