#1235 A is for Antler L is for Light

35×28 Oil on Canvas. Additional work since the previoius post.
How to classify my work isn’t a major concern… but I do wonder what one would call these pieces–the oil painting since #1223–not quite surrealism. I suppose, “abstract” is good enough.

View more work at Saatchi Art, and on my web portfolio: ART BY WILLARD For photos on this blog, click MY ART on the right panel and scroll

Nothing to see here…

We know that color isn’t an attribute of an object, though our senses make it appear so. Color is but one feature our organism has evolved to help us negotiate our way through life. But it’s not color alone that is a deceptive representation. It’s everything. Our senses are useful in helping us survive. We perceive what we need, but it’s all appearance… sound or vision. Even touch. We learn how the physical world is organized, it’s more basic reality, by moving beyond our senses. Those shadowy images of single atoms electron microscopy has given us… are translations. We aren’t seeing actual atoms, which are always in motion, unless… at Kelvin zero. Nothing is as it appears to us.

I guess the Buddhists… and Hindus, are right. It’s all Maya, an illusion, though we are welcome to draw different conclusions about what that means–for our ability to understand reality, about our place in this world. Still… it’s good to remind ourselves: Nothing is what it appears to be. Least of all–those images of our faces and bodies we so love.

What is real… though we have no access to what matters, but through our bodies, our senses… is never reducible to what we know by those senses.

I look at this old cat… 90 in human years… how she looks back at me. And we both know. Beyond words.

She teaches me.

We are so lost in this world of illusions. So lost.

#1233


24×30 Oil on canvas

		The Deer Itself


I saw a deer beside the wooded path

the deer itself

an absence

marked
in bone

without the deer
a leg 
without the flesh

		radius and ulna infused
		are one
		tibia and fibula infused
		are one

femur making three
bones
         one
deer  

disarticulate 
of space and time
beside the rock strewn stream
View more work at Saatchi Art, and on my web portfolio: ART BY WILLARD For photos on this blog, click MY ART on the right panel and scroll

Purim Spiel

from the Beloit Poetry Journal: 1990    

 Purim Spiel --a poem of hope
The elder, alter older -
a tree
alone with its thoughts

Of kings, of Isaac snatched
by the ram's horn
again 

the thorn 
burning for Rivka by the well

Between them wide as an ocean
white wake foaming

a cormorant with flaming tail

Fuming from the waves
its signature of white on blue
a warrant sent 

Against the world

    but wait!

the story changes...
Back track

the firebird on its flume
red tongue panting like a dog
In heat. Esther. Queen
of Persia prancing for her idle king

A worshiper of things
he lays his power down
upon her ceding haunch

And she, she rollicks in her duty
rolls his Majesty
about the gilded room

Until a tree 
grows in his mind    the Alter
Elder is at stake 

its point 

Can touch the heart and 
stop it

Cold, a twitching stick 
with eyes wide

As oceans, as the 

desert city
on the desert's edge    He sees.

Taking in at last
breath

the Jews dancing
for their lives
their purled queen 

the sequined 
Rider blossoming like snow
like the bloom of the dark

crocus below
The bruise under that white 

skin, a king's passion
pressed against her breast
the alter

Of his lust, her love
but not for him - the world

Lays itself before her
renews the pledge    To her

As with each morning
clouds mount 
the skies and ancient trees
will come again to crown gray mountains with new green.


Jacob Russell