 "Your Decisions Matter" (2020 No.2, state 4), oil on canvas, 52x55½ inches {"It's essential that you believe as if your decisions matter... reality isn't important; what's important is your belief..." - Ted Chiang, "Exhalation", 2019} Perhaps, just perhaps, I understand the direction my art is going. This is phantasmagoria. My art is beginning to express phantasmagorical experiences. My images are each part of a sequence that is the real confused with the imaginary. My images are like those seen in a dream. My dreams, like yours, are connected to walk-around reality, but are expanded through emotions and intellect. I do not recognize the places in my drawings and paintings. The painting, "Your Decisions Matter," represents a dream. We are hunkering down in our respective spaces. Our current world feels like a dream. We are waiting for the next shoe to fall. This is surreal. It is unlike anything we have experienced. It is not normal. It will never become normal. It shall pass. It has enlightened me; I believe it has enlightened everyone. Our entire world is involved. We live as one organism, fighting off the same foe. My enlightenment is expressed in a selfish manner; I make art. Through art-making I understand more about myself. I am asking myself this question, "What things are really worth making?" The images I am making require the viewer to cease security, cease personal realms of seeing. Come with me into a place whose space is not normal, where one can live without the stresses of reality. Give into my images and you shall know more. The sights you live with, those you see outside of these images, are limited to your personal reality. These images are a world unto themselves; these images are like you; they are individual expressions. Each expresses itself as itself. Each of you express yourself as yourself. You are all different. My images are all different. The measure of my art's success is self-enlightenment; do you know more after viewing them? If my art succeeds, you will understand more about yourself, you will understand more about here, now, and each step you choose as you go forward.
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 "Clever Liars" (2020 No.1, state 04), oil on canvas, 56½x45¼ inches {"Clever liars give details, but the cleverest don't!" - anonymous} There were the Righteous Brothers. Here's a Righteous Image! More images like this will be a-coming; I have learned I relish direct, in-your-face, principled, irreproachable, and uncorrupted images. I have had a difficult time getting here. Discovering images like these is arduous; I am in the midst of arrival. Images are a-coming that will be easy to visually comprehend but emotionally and intellectually complex. These works will require the viewer to slow down, contemplate, have an extended life of involvement; living with images like these is necessary. Living with these works is like living with a mate; there is no quick way to fully comprehend the character of the being; slow, steady observation, coupled with slow steady contemplation, is required to fully understand. "Clever Liars" is in state 4. Its needs are becoming clarified. Today it calls upon me to paint. right·eous | ˈrīCHəs | (adjective)  Drawing 01·21·2020, graphite on paper, 20x16 inches Notoriety is sought, but is not necessary. I will make art whether it is noticed or not, whether my art is enjoyed by others or not. I would like to live easily and well, enjoying financial profits from my art. However, I am a local variety of artist, not an internationally known entity. I make great art. I make art of substance and profundity. My art is depth-filled, emotion-filled, and intellectually satisfying. I make art despite limited financial success? I make it for myself. I live in a world where my country's leader is devoid of substantial talent, unless you call talent his supreme ability to whine. He has whined himself through life; he is great at it! He has whined despite the enormous financial gift from his father. He lies about, saying he is self-made. He has whined so well that the disenfranchised believe his life is akin their theirs; he has convinced those who suffer and worry that he suffers and worries along with them. His power comes from the votes of the disenfranchised, those who believe their best days are behind them. Should I too whine to get noticed? It obviously has profited the man at the top! I make true work; I do not get attention based upon calling out disgraceful and worse I have even seen and sham and hoax or saying my conversations are perfect and I am the best ever! His language says others have failed, and he has succeeded despite evidence to the contrary. Me, I just do my best.
Yesterday's drawing is successful. It is grand in its comprehension, its exhibition of intellect and emotion. Perhaps this drawing marks my graduation from local interest to international interest. I cannot force that leap to happen. If it does not happen it would be easy to whine about it. In my case I know whining is not my route to attention and financial success. Nice if it were that easy for those of us who do real work.  Drawing 01·16·2020, graphite on paper, 16x20 inches It is a mystery to me the vast degree of difference in sight and understanding, one person to the next. George Bernard Shaw told a story in his autobiography, writing that his eye doctor told him that he sees with normal vision; Shaw asked the doctor, "So I see like everyone else?" The doctor replied, "No, less than 10% of people have normal vision." I feel the same about my work. I believe I see with normal vision. My works visually communicates deep understanding, both intellectual and emotional. Yet I find people who celebrate the clarity of my vision far fewer than those who react to it in any substantial manner; they simply walk by. This is my quandary. I will continue my journey. I continue to hope my work will become more universal in its communication, its social intercourse, thus allowing me to share communion with others.
 Drawing 12·20·2019, graphite on paper, 16x20 inches Am deluding myself? Or...is my work is getting stronger with every effort? I believe this: The unknown essence that is my understanding of art-making, the art I am compelled to make, is increasing rapidly; my unknown is becoming known! Yesterday's drawing is formally robust, emotionally translucent, intellectually satisfying. This drawing steps in the direction that is solely mine. Seeing it trumpets fulfillment, but not finality of fulfillment.
 Drawing 12·04·2019, pencil on paper, 20x16 inches As much as I like the drawings shown in my previous two posts, I like this one more. I like it more because of the process in which it was made: completed in one session, spontaneous without preconception. I am striving to find true emotion in my work; a kind of deep-seated truth that speaks simultaneously my intellect and emotions. I am getting closer, but this is not a battle easily won. I find dark, high contrast spots, areas, and forms, allow for better communication of my feeling; this is an intellectual decision, but rings true. This drawing has that.
 Drawing 11·14·2019, pencil on paper, 16x20 inches I am no longer able to behave badly. Even when I try to risk everything I end up with stuff like this. Organization and clarity have been beaten deep within me; I cannot resist moving toward solutions that call out with a spirit of self-realization. Here it is, yesterday's drawing. I intended to make a quick study, then move on to finishing the painting "Sentence" (2019 No.4). Instead I got locked here, into the force of my own creation. Drawing has become a mindful and mediative experience, dictated by depths that must be intellectual, but are nowhere near out-loud knowing. These come as forces of nature; they become themselves by themselves. I just show up to move the pencil on the paper.
I believe this will occur in my painting as well, but I am not there yet.  Drawing 10·30·2019, pencil on paper, 20x16 inches Mindfulness is filled with humor. Too much reflection on one's origin, or one's end, lends somberness to existence. The fleetingness of existence is humorous; our existence is devoid of eternal consequence. I would be relentlessly somber without humor. I do not like somberness. Life's quickness contains glory, pain, and process. I am choosing to add humor. I will not be forever intelligent and emotive because I am a minute collection of star stuff, Big Bang stuff; I am basic matter and energy. Skill is a curse. It is a responsibility. It opens enormous possibilities. It allows for successful communication. It is painful when neglected or used unwisely. Today you can see me questioning the possibilities of skillfulness; you can see it in the drawing I post today. In humor come my questions. I also post a cartoon. It illustrates human misunderstanding of skill. True skill is rare. Skill exists because its possessor has expanded his/her consciousness. Using skill well allows for depth of meaning, but skill can be used badly to shallowly exhibit sheer bravado.   "Sentence" (2019 No.4, state 11), oil on canvas, 38.5x62.5 inches {"And you’d spend years trying to decipher the sentence, until finally you’d understand it. But after a while you’d realize you got it wrong, and the sentence meant something else entirely." - Tadeusz Dąbrowski, from the poem "Sentence"}  Drawing 10·29·2019 No.1, pencil on paper, 16x20 inches  Drawing 10·29·2019 No.2, pencil on paper, 20x16 inches I am back after a few days off, feeling good, on the road again; my path is my own. Each step surprises me. I step, question by question; my intellectual direction is discovered along my way, step by step by step.
 Drawing 09·28·2019, pencil on paper, 16x20 inches From where does it come? I step up, I begin, it happens. I am giving into me the conduit. I channel the water to the barrier that separates the internal from the external. I work to allow it to spill over the dam. In my earlier living this dam held it back. I have found a means to open the gate through the process of mindful questioning. Without criticism I will continue this process. I know not where I go. I know this: the art I am making is me blurring the distance between that which I know and that which I can make real on paper and canvas.
Yesterday's drawing came in fluidly. It felt real and right, yet I continually questioned if bias, i.e., previous decisions, were tilting my process away from immediate truth telling. The questions remain, the answers will continue. The continuity of mindful questioning will yield truth to be told. |
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At MEHRBACH.com you may view many of my paintings and drawings, past and present, and see details about my life and work. Archives
April 2020
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