Category: Uncategorized

Modality of the Visible

I sat outside A-Space for almost 4 hours. Maybe three people stopped to more than glance at my art. I thought about that post on the time one needs to see, to actually see, a work of art.

More specifically, I was thinking about Joyce’s “ineluctable modality of the visible.”

Who cares, right? but there I was, sitting in the sun, what else did I have to waste my time on?

The visible became words for Joyce. What I was thinking about, was the visible in art that remains in the ‘modality of the visible.”

This is what I do, what I seek out, what I work for in my art–the power of the visible to grasp the attention of the eye, to guide and to reward exploration that has no need to become symbol, message, exhortation or story. Useless.

There I was, useless. Old man trembling in my own private thoughts and anxieties. With my useless art, refusing to allow any meaning beyond the visible to be pried lose from the visible. A vision quest, of no use to the world.

#646 Gates of Unknowing

68.5 x 56 cm. Watercolor, ink, burned Buddhist paper.
Artists learn early that art won’t save us. Not that it ‘can’t,’ but that it won’t. A refusal. No different for the few who find ways to manipulate the capitalist machine to grant them false compensation in money, though that may make it easier to hide from the truth.
I’ve been thinking about this as I’ve worked on my last few pieces. No more than our children can save us, I thought. I feel, even as I work, the increasing distance, this alien thing, this work of my hand and eye–how it absorbs something of the power of the sacred, a power that is not, and never was, my own. And never will be. Like our children–we want them to live, to shine with that life that will never be ours,  even as they abandon us to death.

#646 Gates of Unknowing.JPG

View portfolio here ART BY WILLARD
For photos on this blog:CLICK HERE, and scroll down.

#643

27.5 x 15 cm. Ink wash, pen & ink, watercolor.
#643.jpg

View portfolio here ART BY WILLARD
For photos on this blog:CLICK HERE, and scroll down

I feel like I should come up with a name for these. I find a lot in them–and enjoy looking at them. There’s a dynamic tension, things pulling apart, and a lot of detail. Abstract drawing. Decay of the capitalist state? I’m not sure what it is I’m after in making them. Letting accidents guide my my pen.

First They Shot the Anarchists

itsgoingdown
https://itsgoingdown.org
It’s Going Down is a revolutionary media platform from anarchist, anti-fascist and anti-capitalist movements. We are a network of friends and comrades across so-called North America, who seek to provide news and analysis of when it goes down: riots, strikes, sabotage, occupations, expropriations, rebellion, revolt, insurrection, whether together or alone – we support liberatory revolt. We are a news website and not an organization who seek to uplift and build capacity for a wide range of social struggles, movements, and revolutionary groups.
https://itsgoingdown.org/first-shot-anarchists-trump-new-normal/

View portfolio here ART BY WILLARD
For photos on this blog:CLICK HERE, and scroll down.

Winter: Goby’s Journal

th

Managed to do food shopping yesterday afternoon. Coughed all the way there and back. Once in the store, warm air, I was fine. Wore me plum out. I started off to an Icarus meeting later… got about a block, turned around and came home.

Looong nap today after sleeping late. If I were one of those 19c English poets, I’d be one of em who spent winters in Italy for my lungs.

Any wonder that Winter appears in my poems as Death? If she sometimes appears as a temptress, it’s only because I do find beauty in winter.

I wish I could find a publisher for Chronic, Chronos, Kairos

January 20, 2011
I smiled when winter came to call…
…thinking she’d spared the worst. Ho HO, he said. Her teeth (where I’d thought, Ice) were coals. Two starving sparrows for his eyes. Dream on! she said, & blew into my mouth & touched
her fingers to my lips, caressed my lungs
& took my breath away and tossed it to the wind!

Art-by-WILLARD.com

# 640 Paines Gray with Red

I’ve been thinking about the art I’ve doing. About large pieces and small. The intimate abstractions, water color and ink–like the one at 3rd Street Gallery.
Why would I want to make larger pieces? They are the ones most easily absorbed and used. No mater how wild, how strange. They function as ‘public art,’ even when they’re not. No.
The small pieces–they don’t offer confirmation on that level–confirmation of the Great Social Delusion. They speak to the recesses of mind and heart, the incessant stirrings, the disquieting energy that moves behind the surface.
I started two more tonight. Between coughs, catching my breath. It even felt I could breath a bit easier, having done them. Tomorrow, begin another and finish these. February, day 3.
Go see my piece at 3rd Street tomorrow Let me know what you think

5″ x 4″ Watercolor, ink. One of the pieces I started last night.
No longer available.640-monotone-with-red

View portfolio here ART BY WILLARD
For photos on this blog:CLICK HERE, and scroll down.