signposts in the sea

2011-12-22T21:19:00.001-05:00

Eddie helped paint the porch...

2011-12-22T21:01:00.003-05:00

When I get the sense that a new book is beginning, I start a notebook into which I put anything that might seem relevant, which could be a large-scale plot idea, something overheard on the bus, or a descriptive phrase that came to me on a walk. I don't actually start writing that book until out of all this has emerged a pretty clear plan for the whole thing. I can't just start writing and see what happens. Of course improvisation is an important part- I would find it dreadfully boring if I planned everything. What keeps you going are the discoveries you make in the course of writing."

Alan Hollinghurs, from an interview in The Paris Review

2011-12-21T05:52:00.000-05:00

"only dead fish follow the stream"

- a Finnish expression

2011-12-20T19:24:00.000-05:00

"Workmanship of risk is, generally, the making of anything individually by hand, the creation of a product that is never exactly the same twice...

Because the outcome of workmanship of risk is never certain, the quality of it is determined by the care, dexterity, and judgement of the worker...

from Wooden Boats by Michael Ruhlman

2011-12-20T05:36:00.001-05:00

2011-12-20T05:23:00.000-05:00

“When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece.”

John Ruskin

2011-11-06T21:35:00.000-05:00

"I never if I can help it get into the specifics of songs and their meanings. If you're a songwriter, and your idea is that your songs are helpful to yourself and others, they sort of operate on this sense of mystery. They don't function if they are explained; it puts out the fire." Ryan Adams in nyt interview 10/11/11

2011-11-06T21:30:00.001-05:00

treasures found behind the wall at 2107

2011-07-23T05:00:00.001-04:00

"He loathed gentility and social convention. To him they smacked of fakery, like the various artistic symbolisms, Surrealism among them, that modern painting had contrived. The real world, stripped bare, already presented unfathomable strangeness and fascination. An artistic life should exhaust itself trying to unpack it."

Michael Kimmelman about Lucian Freud

2011-07-22T05:00:00.002-04:00

"Outside it is day. You have entered, and your eyes are blinded with so much darkness. It penetrates deeply into the pupils of your eyes and hurts. You close your eyes for a moment, until they have adjusted themselves. Both are within you, the darkness and the brightness, they are yours in the depths of you retina, and you can draw them from the same well; which it will be depends on whether you stand in the light or in darkness."

from The Death of the Adversary by Hans Keilson

2011-07-21T18:45:00.000-04:00

2011-07-21T18:22:00.003-04:00

"The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man's insanity is heavens sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God."

from Moby Dick by Herman Melville

2011-07-08T10:51:00.003-04:00

"... in America, where a national bent for proprietary branding can confuse a signature look with quality."

Peter Schjeldahl in a review of Blinky Palermo

2011-07-07T08:37:00.004-04:00

"If you listen first, and write later, then whatever you write will have had time to filter through your brain, and you'll be in what you say. This is what makes you exist. If you are only a reflector of information, are you really there?"

Jaron Lanier

2011-06-27T14:29:00.004-04:00

tree i pass on my walk from Union Station to NMAI

2011-06-27T14:26:00.002-04:00

The television stayed on day and night, singing like a Siren in the crowded house. “Come sit by me and die a little,” it said.

Salvatore Scibona from Where I Learned to Read in the June 13 New Yorker

2011-03-24T16:22:00.002-04:00

"It took me years to realize a very simple thing, which is that when you write fiction you're raising questions, and a lot of people think you're playing a little game with them and that actually you know the answers to the questions. They read your question. They don't know how to answer correctly. And they think that if they could only meet you personally and look into your eyes, you could give them the answers.

At readings I'm quite often speechless, actually. I am very happy that I am striking a nerve. But it's when they take it a step further and think that i have the salve for the nerve I've hit, or that I have personally lived through that myself, and that therefore we have a common bond, because they have also lived through that - then I begin to realize that what is between me and other people isn't kinship but a kind of gulf."

Anne Beattie in The Paris Review

2011-02-28T00:53:00.002-05:00

found in federal hill

2011-02-10T09:21:00.000-05:00

"Repressed people take it out on the people around them. Enfranchised people discover pride."

Roger Cohen in the NYT

2011-01-27T05:33:00.000-05:00

"For me, however, the greatest pleasure is to overcome some difficulty, to find or invent something while I work. I begin by posing myself a problem. But I don't wish merely to solve this problem. While I solve it, I want to find something else, I want to stumble across something that prods me into unknown territory. Out of boredom or the need to entertain myself, I end up discovering something that gives me pleasure.

This kind of work seems to develop me, to educate me, while painting landscapes is another matter entirely. There I enter into a much more sensual state of the soul, in which I have the satisfaction of finding exactly what I already know. Many painters surrender themselves to this sensual pleasure- it allows them to duplicate the things they already know, and they think it's a marvel that all these creations are ultimately recognizable as their own work.

It's a little bit like fairy tales, which end exactly the same way they did the last time we heard them."

Saul Steinberg

2011-01-26T15:25:00.003-05:00

"... grand ideas kill first efforts. Begin with something in your range. Then write it as a secret. I'd be paralyzed if I thought I had to write a great novel, and no matter how good I think a book is on one day, I know that a time will come when I will look upon it as a failure. The gratification has to come from the effort itself. I try not to look back. I approach the work as though, in truth, I'm nothing and the words are everything. Then I write to save my life. If you are a writer, that will be true. Writing has saved my life."

Louise Erdrich in The Paris Review

2011-01-23T21:12:00.003-05:00

found at the edge of the harbor in baltimore...

“Grant mystery it‘s eternal validity and rather than solving it, look for ways to contemplate it and give it honor.”

Thomas Moore

2011-01-18T15:52:00.000-05:00

Blizzard Park

22x16"

2011-01-18T10:24:00.000-05:00

"The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly."
from Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes

2011-01-07T22:19:00.001-05:00

"Mr. Neuberger bought all his works himself, usually through dealers. And his taste ran toward the bold. “I liked adventuresome work that I often didn’t understand,” he told The Times as he was celebrating his 100th birthday. “For art to be very good it has to be over your head.”

from the NYT obit for Roy R. Neuberger

2011-01-06T09:06:00.001-05:00

"I don’t distort. I comment honestly and make pictures of my perceptions. The celebrity is but a person to me. I see them within the primary moment. I try not to have previous assumptions. Each moment is the only moment that we have. We have to enter it without prejudice and with the thought that it may be the last one. The photograph is an attempt to give the perception of the moment some relationship to immortality."

from an interview with Larry Fink in the NYT

2010-12-28T20:11:00.000-05:00

from the sketchbook:

trees in frozen river

2010-12-12T19:53:00.000-05:00

from the sketchbook

2010-12-09T19:10:00.001-05:00

from the sketchbook...

2010-10-31T23:37:00.003-04:00

from the sketchbook- morning glories in the alley

2010-10-20T01:00:00.003-04:00

"We learned a whole new attitude about what art could be- not expression but investigation."

Jack Goldstein about John Baldessari's teaching

2010-10-19T12:51:00.004-04:00

"What's the average time a person looks at a painting- seven seconds? I want to get them hooked. I have to raise the bar in such a way that they're not going to get it, but they want to get it."

John Baldessari

2010-10-06T17:01:00.001-04:00

"The road less traveled sure got a lot of stones."

Everlast from the Whitey Ford Sings the Blues album

2010-10-04T16:21:00.001-04:00

"We, as a species, are always looking for cathedrals made of fire, and part of the thrill of reading a great book is the promise of another yet to come, a book that may move us even more deeply, raise us even higher. One of the consolations of writing books is the seemingly unquenchable conviction that the next book will be better, will be bigger and bolder and more comprehensive and truer to the lives we live. We exist in a condition of hope, we love the beauty and truth that come to us, and we do our best to tamp down our doubts and disappointments."

Michael Cunningham

2010-10-01T14:28:00.001-04:00

"When you get to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on."
Franklin D. Roosevelt

2010-10-01T14:22:00.003-04:00

found in the park this morning

2010-09-30T12:40:00.005-04:00

"I should advise you to put it all down as beautifully as you can- in some beautifully bound book. It will seem as if you were making the visions banal- but then you need to do that- then you are freed from the power of them... Then when these things are in some precious book you can go to the book & turn over the pages & for you it will be your church- your cathedral- the silent places of your spirit where you will find renewal. If anyone tells you that it is morbid or neurotic and you listen to them- then you will lose your soul- for in that book is your soul."

Carl Jung

2010-09-30T12:37:00.000-04:00

from the sketchbook-

'out on a limb in the dark'

8x15"

2010-09-29T16:25:00.001-04:00

"It is the first vision that counts. The artist has only to remain true to his dream and it will possess his work in such a manner that it will resemble the work of no other... for no two visions are alike, and those who reach the heights have all toiled up steep mountains by a different route. To each has been revealed a different panorama."

Albert Pinkham Ryder

2010-09-17T07:42:00.000-04:00

"Was there ever a more horrible blasphemy than the statement that all the knowledge of God is confined to this or that book? How dare men call God infinite, and yet try to compress Him within the covers of a little book!"

Swami Vivekananda

2010-09-16T16:39:00.003-04:00

"I would hope that my music is smarter, stronger than I am. It should be elastic and sophisticated enough to endure many listenings, many interpretations. It's like scrambling onto the roof from the highest rung of the ladder which lies just beneath the lip of the roof. Every musical thing I do is like jumping onto the roof from that rung. Higher, better than I can be most of the time."

Patricia Barber from her blog

2010-09-14T10:15:00.000-04:00

"How life is strange and changeful, and the crystal is in the steel at the point of fracture, and the toad bears a jewel in its forehead, and the meaning of moments passes like breeze that scarcely ruffles the leaves of willows. "

from All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren

2010-09-08T15:02:00.001-04:00

found at ferry bar park today

while scavenging for styrofoam

for an installation at school 33 in january

2010-09-08T14:58:00.000-04:00

"For the sake of a few lines one must see many cities, men and things. One must know the animals, one must feel how the birds fly and know the gesture with which the small flowers open in the morning. One must be able to think back to roads in unknown regions, to unexpected meetings and to partings which one had long seen coming; to days of childhood that are still unexplained, to parents that one had to hurt when they brought one some joy and one did not grasp it (it was joy for someone else); to childhood illness that so strangely began with a number of profound and grave transformations, to days in rooms withdrawn and quiet and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along on high and flew with all the stars-and it is not enough if one may think all of this. One must have memories of many nights of love, none of which was like the others, of the screams of women in labor, and of light, white, sleeping women in childbed, closing again. But one must also have been beside the dying, one must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the fitful noises. And still it is not enough to have memories. One must be able to forget them when they are many, and one must have the great patience to wait until they come again. For it is not yet the memories themselves. Not until they have turned to blood within us, to glance, to gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves-not until then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them."
from 'The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge' by Rainer Maria Rilke

2010-08-27T04:40:00.003-04:00

"Hercules was slain by a magic shirt he had donned in all innocence, its poisoned fabric immediately fusing with his own skin, burning on his body like boiling oil. He could not cast it off again except at the price of his very life.

Groaning, roaring, and finally mad with the pain, this invincible man tore his own skin and flesh from his bones along with the shirt, laid bare his bleeding sinews, his shoulder blades, the red cage of his ribs, and inside it, lungs burning out, his heart. He fell. And the light from that day gathered in seven ponds, into which the wretched man's blood and sweat dissolved, seven mirrors that bore the image of the sky,- clouds, shadows, emptiness. Then it was night. But the light of the seven ponds remained and rose up, stars among the stars of the firmament."

from " The Last World" by Christoph Ransmayr

2010-08-27T04:35:00.005-04:00

from the sketchbook,

reflections in lavalette canal

2010-08-20T15:01:00.004-04:00

"Each forest outline, each pond, the course of each river had glided itself through the hands of Arachne the weaver, the deaf mute, for whom, so Echo said, her loom was a window trellised with threads, looking into a garishly bright and soundless world...

Echo alone would have been capable of understanding her explanation and of translating for the Roman how her tapestry was of value to the deaf-mute woman only as long as it was still growing, stretched on the frame of her loom's beams and shafts. Once completed, whatever landed in this moldy room would be pulled out again only when a smelter or a farmer wanted to decorate his sooty walls with a beautiful landscape gave her a sheep in trade, whereupon Arachne would simply cut the ropes binding its legs and let it run wild on the stony terraces of the cliffs."

from "the Last World" by Christoph Ransmayr

2010-07-31T12:38:00.000-04:00

"Time isn't made of anything. It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose upon motion."
from The Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson

2010-07-28T17:58:00.001-04:00

prayers

24x16"

now in the collection of Teresa Indjein

2010-07-26T16:55:00.001-04:00

"Do you have the patience to wait until your mud settles and the water is clear?"
— Laozi from the Tao Te Ching

2010-07-26T16:51:00.001-04:00

flashing fishes

now in the collection of Amy, North Carolina

22x16"

2010-07-22T11:18:00.000-04:00

"The two most powerful warriors are patience and time."
Leo Tolstoy

2010-07-21T15:25:00.000-04:00

"Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world."
Harriet Tubman

2010-07-20T13:52:00.002-04:00

"...a certain fundamental opacity of human being, which likes to show the truth by allowing it to be seen hiding."

Anne Carson

2010-07-19T10:16:00.008-04:00

"I do not want to die, even if Hans and Karl should die. I do not want to go until I have faithfully made the most of my talent and cultivated the seed that was placed in me until the last twig has grown.... since I am to be the cultivator, I want to serve it faithfully. Since recognizing that, I am almost serene and much firmer in spirit. It is not only that I am permitted to finish my work - I am obliged to finish it. This seems to be the meaning of all the gabble about culture. Culture arises only when the individual fulfills his cycle of obligations. If everyone recognizes and fulfills his cycle of obligations, genuineness emerges. The culture of a whole nation can in the final analysis be built upon nothing else but this."

from the Diary and Letters of Kaethe Kollwitz

2010-07-16T16:05:00.003-04:00

deep blue

16x22"

in the collection of Jonathan Palevsky, Baltimore

2010-07-16T12:13:00.001-04:00

from an article in The New York Times about the sex abuse cases of Bishop Vangheluwe and Roman Polanski:

"....If this is in part a morality tale — permissiveness corrodes virtue, illicit urges undermine restraint — is morality itself a relative concept?

That question seemed likely to be asked more searchingly this week after the Vatican issued new rules about the handling of priestly abuse, listing pedophilia in a catalog of other supposed grave crimes including “the attempted ordination of women.”

“What I did, supporting the ordination of women, they saw as a serious crime,” said the Rev. Roy Bourgeois, an American priest excommunicated less than two months after he participated in a ceremony ordaining women. “But priests who were abusing children, they did not see as a crime. What does that say?”...."

2010-06-23T17:47:00.004-04:00

"Sometimes I think creativity is a matter of seeing, or stumbling over, unobvious similarities between things- like composing a fresh metaphor, but on a more complex scale."

David Mitchell

2010-06-22T17:23:00.003-04:00

"It was as if with time he had transposed everything he was capable of saying and writing to the realm of his poetry, to rhythmical language or perfected prose, and in the process had turned mute in the world of everyday speech, of dialect, of screams and fragmented sentences and phrases."

from The Last World by Christoph Ransmayr

2010-06-17T10:00:00.001-04:00

from the sketchbook-

N.E. corner of Patterson Park Ave. & Madison St.

2010-06-17T09:56:00.001-04:00

"She looked up at me, and the whole world disappeared. Like there was just us, like there would always be just us, and we didn't need magic for that. It was sort of happy and sad, all at the same time. I couldn't be around her without feeling things, without feeling everything."
from Beautiful Creatures Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl

2010-06-16T10:19:00.001-04:00

harbor blossoms

22x16"

2010-06-16T10:11:00.002-04:00

"...he failed to say the words that normal, heartsick people want to hear: life is not a cosmic accident, not evidence of a punishing al powerful god. Instead he ground his teeth against his desire to tell them the truth: god is helpless. We are at the mercy of our own radical freedom, and all god can do is take into god’s self the grief, the violence, the sublime acts of kindness, the good sex. God comes to us from the future, and has only one gift: the lure. We are lured toward truth, beauty and goodness...the lure is pulling at our hearts like some lucid joy inside every actual occasion and all we have to do is ... say yes."

from The Solace of Leaving Early by Haven Kimmel

2010-06-15T10:57:00.000-04:00

from the sketchbook- fireflies in the park

2010-06-02T12:20:00.000-04:00

"When love has fused and mingled two beings in a sacred and angelic unity, the secret of life has been discovered so far as they are concerned; they are no longer anything more than the two boundaries of the same destiny; they are no longer anything but the two wings of the same spirit. Love, soar."

Victor Hugo

2010-06-02T12:16:00.002-04:00

positive thinking (1402 N. Milton St.)

22x16"

now in the collection of Dave and Rebecca Pille

2010-05-26T14:32:00.003-04:00

"The first year it sank in how far over my head I was. The next two years were '79 and '80, and I was really unhappy. I thought I was in a cave and I couldn't get out. It was just too big a thing.

The funny thing is that you get to a certain point and you can't quit. Because I always worried: if you quit, you'll quit again. The only way out was to go forward, to learn your way and write your way out of it."

John McPhee from a Paris Review interview

2010-05-25T08:54:00.000-04:00

"We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations."

Anais Nin

2010-05-17T15:59:00.002-04:00

"There are others so continually in the agitation of gross and merely sensual pleasures, or so occupied in the low drudgery of avarice, or so heated in the chase of honours and distinction, that their minds, which had been used continually in the storms of these violent and tempestuous passions, can hardly be put in motion by the delicate and refined play of the imagination."

from On the Sublime and Beautiful by Edmund Burke

2010-05-14T00:14:00.000-04:00

"The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion."

Albert Camus

2010-05-14T00:10:00.001-04:00

urban layers

24x16"

2010-05-04T01:17:00.002-04:00

from the sketchbook: 1402 North Milton Ave.

another profusion of fake flowers on a stoop.

there is usually a theme- her's seems to be lilac.

must be somebody's grandmother...

2010-05-04T01:13:00.001-04:00

from the sketchbook: 4/21, dandelions

giving me their much-needed yellow howl

in a derelict side yard on the way to the studio

2010-05-03T16:38:00.001-04:00

Haruki Murakami's acceptance speech for the 2009 Jerusalem Prize:

I have come to Jerusalem today as a novelist, which is to say as a professional spinner of lies.

Of course, novelists are not the only ones who tell lies. Politicians do it, too, as we all know. Diplomats and military men tell their own kinds of lies on occasion, as do used car salesmen, butchers and builders. The lies of novelists differ from others, however, in that no one criticizes the novelist as immoral for telling them. Indeed, the bigger and better his lies and the more ingeniously he creates them, the more he is likely to be praised by the public and the critics. Why should that be?

My answer would be this: Namely, that by telling skillful lies - which is to say, by making up fictions that appear to be true - the novelist can bring a truth out to a new location and shine a new light on it. In most cases, it is virtually impossible to grasp a truth in its original form and depict it accurately. This is why we try to grab its tail by luring the truth from its hiding place, transferring it to a fictional location, and replacing it with a fictional form. In order to accomplish this, however, we first have to clarify where the truth lies within us. This is an important qualification for making up good lies.
Today, however, I have no intention of lying. I will try to be as honest as I can. There are a few days in the year when I do not engage in telling lies, and today happens to be one of them.

So let me tell you the truth. A fair number of people advised me not to come here to accept the Jerusalem Prize. Some even warned me they would instigate a boycott of my books if I came.

The reason for this, of course, was the fierce battle that was raging in Gaza. The UN reported that more than a thousand people had lost their lives in the blockaded Gaza City, many of them unarmed citizens - children and old people.

Any number of times after receiving notice of the award, I asked myself whether traveling to Israel at a time like this and accepting a literary prize was the proper thing to do, whether this would create the impression that I supported one side in the conflict, that I endorsed the policies of a nation that chose to unleash its overwhelming military power. This is an impression, of course, that I would not wish to give. I do not approve of any war, and I do not support any nation. Neither, of course, do I wish to see my books subjected to a boycott.

Finally, however, after careful consideration, I made up my mind to come here. One reason for my decision was that all too many people advised me not to do it. Perhaps, like many other novelists, I tend to do the exact opposite of what I am told. If people are telling me - and especially if they are warning me - "don't go there," "don't do that," I tend to want to "go there" and "do that." It's in my nature, you might say, as a novelist. Novelists are a special breed. They cannot genuinely trust anything they have not seen with their own eyes or touched with their own hands.

And that is why I am here. I chose to come here rather than stay away. I chose to see for myself rather than not to see. I chose to speak to you rather than to say nothing.

This is not to say that I am here to deliver a political message. To make judgments about right and wrong is one of the novelist's most important duties, of course.

It is left to each writer, however, to decide upon the form in which he or she will convey those judgments to others. I myself prefer to transform them into stories - stories that tend toward the surreal. Which is why I do not intend to stand before you today delivering a direct political message.

Please do, however, allow me to deliver one very personal message. It is something that I always keep in mind while I am writing fiction. I have never gone so far as to write it on a piece of paper and paste it to the wall: Rather, it is carved into the wall of my mind, and it goes something like this:

"Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg."

Yes, no matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the egg, I will stand with the egg. Someone else will have to decide what is right and what is wrong; perhaps time or history will decide. If there were a novelist who, for whatever reason, wrote works standing with the wall, of what value would such works be?

What is the meaning of this metaphor? In some cases, it is all too simple and clear. Bombers and tanks and rockets and white phosphorus shells are that high, solid wall. The eggs are the unarmed civilians who are crushed and burned and shot by them. This is one meaning of the metaphor.

This is not all, though. It carries a deeper meaning. Think of it this way. Each of us is, more or less, an egg. Each of us is a unique, irreplaceable soul enclosed in a fragile shell. This is true of me, and it is true of each of you. And each of us, to a greater or lesser degree, is confronting a high, solid wall. The wall has a name: It is The System. The System is supposed to protect us, but sometimes it takes on a life of its own, and then it begins to kill us and cause us to kill others - coldly, efficiently, systematically.

I have only one reason to write novels, and that is to bring the dignity of the individual soul to the surface and shine a light upon it. The purpose of a story is to sound an alarm, to keep a light trained on The System in order to prevent it from tangling our souls in its web and demeaning them. I fully believe it is the novelist's job to keep trying to clarify the uniqueness of each individual soul by writing stories - stories of life and death, stories of love, stories that make people cry and quake with fear and shake with laughter. This is why we go on, day after day, concocting fictions with utter seriousness.

My father died last year at the age of 90. He was a retired teacher and a part-time Buddhist priest. When he was in graduate school, he was drafted into the army and sent to fight in China. As a child born after the war, I used to see him every morning before breakfast offering up long, deeply-felt prayers at the Buddhist altar in our house. One time I asked him why he did this, and he told me he was praying for the people who had died in the war.

He was praying for all the people who died, he said, both ally and enemy alike. Staring at his back as he knelt at the altar, I seemed to feel the shadow of death hovering around him.

My father died, and with him he took his memories, memories that I can never know. But the presence of death that lurked about him remains in my own memory. It is one of the few things I carry on from him, and one of the most important.

I have only one thing I hope to convey to you today. We are all human beings, individuals transcending nationality and race and religion, fragile eggs faced with a solid wall called The System. To all appearances, we have no hope of winning. The wall is too high, too strong - and too cold. If we have any hope of victory at all, it will have to come from our believing in the utter uniqueness and irreplaceability of our own and others' souls and from the warmth we gain by joining souls together.

Take a moment to think about this. Each of us possesses a tangible, living soul. The System has no such thing. We must not allow The System to exploit us. We must not allow The System to take on a life of its own. The System did not make us: We made The System.

That is all I have to say to you.

I am grateful to have been awarded the Jerusalem Prize. I am grateful that my books are being read by people in many parts of the world. And I am glad to have had the opportunity to speak to you here today.

2010-05-01T22:27:00.002-04:00

Decalogue of the Artist

1. You shall love beauty, which is the shadow of God over the Universe

2. There is no godless art. Although you love not the Creator, you shall bear witness to Him creating His likeness.

3. You shall create beauty not to excite the senses but to give sustenance to the soul.

4. You shall never use beauty as a pretext to luxury and vanity but as a spiritual devotion.

5. You shall not seek beauty at carnival or fair or offer your work there, for beauty is virginal and is not to be found at carnival or fair.

6. Beauty shall rise form your heart in song, and yo shall be the first to be purified.

7. The beauty you create shall be known as compassion and shall console the hearts of men.

8. You shall bring forth your work as a mother brings forth her child: out of the blood of your heart.

9. Beauty shall not be an opiate that puts you to sleep but a strong wine that fires you to action, for if you fail to be a true man or a true woman, you will fail to be an artist.

10. Each act of creation shall leave you humble, for it is never as great as your dream and always inferior to that most marvelous dream of God which is Nature.

- Gabriela Mistral

2010-04-29T13:47:00.000-04:00

"I wish I were a poet. I've never confessed that to anyone, and I'm confessing it to you, because you've given me reason to feel that I can trust you. I've spent my life observing the universe, mostly in my mind's eye. It's been a tremendously rewarding life, a wonderful life. I've been able to explore the origins of time and space with some of the great living thinkers. But I wish I were a poet.
Albert Einstein, a hero of mine, once wrote, 'Our situation is the following. We are standing in front of a closed box which we cannot open.'
I'm sure I don't have to tell you that the vast majority of the universe is composed of dark matter. The fragile balance depends on things we'll never be able to see, hear, smell, taste, or touch. Life itself depends on them. What's real? What isn't real? Maybe those aren't the right questions to be asking. What does life depend on?
I wish I had made things for life to depend on."
Jonathan Safran Foer

2010-04-22T10:40:00.002-04:00

"Jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down."

Ray Bradbury

2010-04-21T12:20:00.004-04:00

"I used to think when I was younger and writing that each idea had a certain shape and when I started to study Greek and I found the word morphe it was for me just the right word for that, unlike the word shape in English which falls a bit short, morphe in Greek means the the sort of plastic contours that an idea has inside all your senses when you grasp it the first moment and it always seemed to me that a work should play out that same contour in its form. So I can’t start writing something down until I get a sense of that, that morphe. And then it unfolds, I wouldn’t say naturally, but it unfolds gropingly by keeping only to the contours of that form whatever it is."

Anne Carson

2010-04-21T06:00:00.001-04:00

meadow

24x16"

2010-04-19T17:52:00.001-04:00

unfurling

22x16"

now in the collection of Sandi Gerstung

2010-04-11T03:41:00.000-04:00

"To get born, your body makes a pact with death, and from that moment

all it tries to do is cheat"

from Louise Gluck's "A Slip of Paper"

2010-04-09T05:47:00.000-04:00

"When I was a younger man, art was a lonely thing. No galleries, no collectors, no critics, no money. Yet, it was a golden age, for we all had nothing to lose and a vision to gain. Today it is not quite the same. It is a time of tons of verbiage, activity, consumption. Which condition is better for the world at large I shall not venture to discuss. But I do know, that many of those who are driven to this life are desperately searching for those pockets of silence where we can root and grow. We must all hope we find them."

Mark Rothko

2010-04-09T04:39:00.000-04:00

exuberant nostalgia

22x16"

2010-04-08T04:37:00.002-04:00

across the park

22x16"

collection of Sunny & Chris, Cleveland OH

2010-04-07T17:08:00.000-04:00

"Societies in decline have no use for visionaries."

Anais Nin

2010-04-07T04:35:00.000-04:00

rocky shore jewels

22x16"

2010-04-06T05:58:00.000-04:00

"The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you."

David Foster Wallace

2010-04-06T04:25:00.000-04:00

bay oases

22X16"

2010-04-05T04:33:00.000-04:00

flora eterna, 2402 calvert street

2010-04-04T17:04:00.001-04:00

Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said: "one can't believe impossible things."
"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

from Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll

2010-04-04T04:30:00.002-04:00

night alley river

22x16"

now in the collection of Teresa Indjein

2010-04-03T17:02:00.000-04:00

"Do one thing everyday that scares you."

Eleanor Roosevelt

2010-04-03T04:19:00.000-04:00

snowy park lanterns

22x16"

2010-04-02T17:13:00.001-04:00

"And I, infinitesimal being,

drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
I felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind."

Pablo Neruda

2010-04-02T16:15:00.001-04:00

winter cosmos tree

22x16"

collection of Summer & Matt Gonter

2010-04-02T10:13:00.001-04:00

"Most governments release a ton of data on economic trends but not enough on trust and other social conditions. In short, modern societies have developed vast institutions oriented around the things that are easy to count, not around the things that matter most. They have an affinity for material concerns and a primordial fear of moral and social ones."

David Brooks, NYT 3/29/2010

2010-04-01T20:09:00.003-04:00

“These new collectors never knew the Sculls,” Ms. Goldman said. “They tell the story of a couple who simply collected with their gut.”

from New York Times article about an exhibit of the Scull's collection at the Acquavella Gallery in NY

2010-03-30T18:35:00.000-04:00

"A while ago, I was at a restaurant with my mother, and she fancied the waiter's hands. She said to me, ''I worry that I will never be touched again, except by the undertaker.'' I kept thinking about that, how, as you get older, age and time become more and more interesting. The idea for ''The Mother'' involves sex of a scandalous nature, and I realized that would be a good starting point. But it was the undressing of her dignity that moved me."

Hanif Kureishi, film maker

2010-03-08T10:11:00.003-05:00

'Kite', 22x16"

now in the collection of

Amy McGrath, Raleigh, NC

2010-03-03T22:07:00.000-05:00

"Otherwise, all I remember of the denizens of the Nocturama is that several of them had strikingly large eyes, and the fixed inquiring gaze found in certain painters and philosophers who seek to penetrate the darkness which surrounds us purely by means of looking and thinking."

from Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald