"Evil is the refusal to see one's self in others."

Richard Powers

"Only reason can convince us of those three fundamental truths without a recognition of which there can be no effective liberty: that what we believe is not necessarily true; that what we like is not necessarily good; and that all questions are open."

Clive Bell

"No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear."

C.S. Lewis

sleeping beauties: early cartographic term for uncharted territories

Lullaby, 22x16x5"

"They play with visual percepts- the fleeting formations in the brain that summarize vision on the verge of consciousness...

You know it's an object, but your eyes, assaulted by fractured reflections of the room, don't agree. Your percept stutters with incessant double takes. Is this pleasant? It is if you surrender to it, accepting with fascination, the humiliating faultiness of human perception. Seeing that you don't see and knowing that you don't know, you are flooded with an awareness of reality beyond your conscious grasp. Actually, any successful art may bring about something like that."

Peter Schjeldahl about the Light and Space artists in L.A. from the late sixties

"I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed. And then? I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed. And what next? I get laid, I take a short holiday, but very soon after I fall upon those same thorns with gratification in pain, or suffering in joy - who knows what the mixture is! What good, what lasting good is there in me? Is there nothing else between birth and death but what I can get out of this perversity - only a favorable balance of disorderly emotions? No freedom? Only impulses? And what about all the good I have in my heart - does it mean anything? Is it simply a joke? A false hope that makes a man feel the illusion of worth? And so he goes on with his struggles. But this good is no phony. I know it isn't. I swear it."

from Herzog by Saul Bellow

"Deep in each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence. Something knows, and cannot be fled nor hid from."

from The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy

"I look back now and think, How lucky

not to know what you are doing."

William Kentridge about his early films

from an interview with Calvin Tomkins

in the 1/18/10 The New Yorker

keeping the faith, 22x16"

"The long-planned-for rituals of departure were forgotten in the confusion, but strangely, this great outburst of activity became itself a kind of worship, not so much intended to achieve an end... but rather as an expression of awe, of the kind that might great a divine revelation: for when a moment arrives that is so much feared and so much long awaited, it perforates the veil of everyday expectation in such a way as to reveal the prodigious darkness of the unknown."

from Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh

"The essence of Warhol's genius was to eliminate the one aspect of a thing without which that thing would, to conventional ways of thinking, cease to be itself, and then to see what happened."

Louis Menand about Andy Warhol in the Jan, 11, 2010 New Yorker

“We might think of the culture as possessing a ‘symptom repertoire’ — a range of physical symptoms available to the unconscious mind for the physical expression of psychological conflict.”

from Paralysis: The Rise and Fall of a ‘Hysterical’ Symptom by Edward Shorter

"Art begins when a (hu)man, with a purpose of communicating to other people a feeling he once experienced, calls it up again within himself and expresses it by certain external signs."

Leo Tolstoy

Fallen, 20x16"

now in the collection of

Barbara & Jimmy Walton, Georgia

"Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. there is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there."

Henry Miller

Happy New Year!

May we remember to look as closely as we do when we are in foreign lands, and maybe bring a little of the amazing colors back home with us.

mumbai fishing village, low tide

"Iqbal, that great poet, was so right. The moment you recognize what is beautiful in this world, you stop being a slave. To hell with the Naxals and their guns shipped from China. If you taught every poor boy how to paint, that would be the end of the rich in India."

from The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

"If I could have one super power, I would choose the ability to change the colors of things."

Porter Tierney, age 4

"There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in."

Leonard Cohen

photo taken on way to elephanta in india

"I have always looked upon decay as being just as wonderful and rich an expression of life as growth."

Henry Miller

"Cast Asea", 20x16"
collection of John Chandler & family, Maryland

"Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, but to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such."

Henry Miller

"Joy", 24x14"

from the collection of Wendy & Emily, Washington DC

"This was the year, at five or six, that I learned the meaning of "reverence," which, as I understand it, is the natural attitude to take toward magical, unverifiable, phenomena, the same way that "respect" and "obedience" describe the attitude one takes toward observable physical phenomena, such as gravity or money."

from 'All That' by David Foster Wallace

Mumbai Apartment Building at Night

from the sketchbook December 2, 2009

from the sketchbook 11.26.09

after first day in mumbai

"inconvenience regretted"

(construction sign on street in mumbai)

"If we are always arriving and departing, it is also true that we are eternally anchored. One's destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things."

Henry Miller

"The policy of being too cautious is the greatest risk of all."

Jawaharlal Nehru

Notes to myself on beginning a painting.

1. Attempt what is not certain. Certainty may or may not come later. It may then be a valuable delusion.

2. The pretty initial position which falls short of completeness is not to be valued---except as a stimulus for further moves.

3. Do search. But in order to find what is not searched for.

4. Use and respond to the initial fresh qualities but consider them absolutely expendable.

5. Don't "discover" a subject---of any kind.

6. Somehow don't be bored---but if you must, use it in action. Use its destructive potential.

7. Mistakes can't be erased but they move you from your present position.

8. Keep thinking about Pollyanna.

9. Tolerate chaos.

10. Be careful only in a perverse way.

from Richard Diebenkorn's notebooks

"This was what Bertrand Russell called his 'Ten Commandments' as a teacher.

1. Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.
2. Do not think it worthwhile to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.
3. Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.
4. When you meet opposition, even if it should come from your husband, wife or children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority- for victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.
5. Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are contrary authorities to be found.
6. Do not use power to suppress opinion you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.
7. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
8. Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence, as you should, the former implies a deeper argument than the latter.
9. Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.
10. Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool's paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness."

"Boredom is an instrument of social control. Power is the power to impose boredom, to command stasis, to combine this stasis with anguish. The real tedium, deep tedium, is seasoned with terror and with death."

from Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow

"I don’t acknowledge barriers.

My attitude is kind of punk, in that I don’t respect rules or dogmas. I like mixtures, the challenges they present, and finding new solutions to old questions.

Why must the stage always be horizontal and the dancer vertical?

Why not use movement to subvert space and question gravity? And so I set about investigating ways to do that, in both the horizontal and vertical planes.

Art is not a question of winning and losing. It’s about exploration and experimentation and transformation and discovery, and I take great pleasure in that.”

Deborah Colker in nytimes 10/21/09

“For me, making art is about a sense of agency. I’m most interested in how to construct meaning through images from the fragmentary aspects of our lives. We don’t have to be passive participants in what goes on around us. We can be empowered by actively projecting our own meaning and understanding onto the world."

“The sheet of paper and the projection screen are membranes where the outside world meets my inside world. Art should be a dialogue. I expect my drawings, films and theatrical works to be met halfway by the viewer, who must also invest them with meaning.”

william kentridge- nytimes, 10/23/09

"People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest."

Hermann Hesse

Intrepid, 6.5 x 4.5'
from sketchbook 10/9/09

"This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one, the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy."
George Bernard Shaw

"Color is a power which directly influences the soul."
Wassily Kandinsky

"How long had they been? Three hours? More? The distance between then and now was packed full of timeduring which his furious mind had prodded the outsides of a myriad fantasies and (if he were asked he would have said) nothing had happened. Thoughts of madness: Perhaps those moments of micast reality or lost time were the points (during times when nothing happened) when the prodding broke through. The language that happened on other muscles than the tongue was better for grasping these. Things he could not say wobbled in his mouth, and brought back, vividly in the black, how at age four he had sat in teh cellar, putting into his mouth, one after the other, blue, orange, and pink marbles, to see if he could taste the colors."
from Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany

"Want of imagination makes things unreal enough to be destroyed. By imagination I mean knowledge and love. I mean compassion. People of power kill children, the old send the young to die, because they have no imagination. They have power. Can you have power and imagination at the same time? Can you kill people you don’t know and have compassion for them at the same time?"
Wendell Berry

"I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unnerving ease. It begins in your mind, always ... so you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don't, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you."
from Life of Pi by Yann Martel

"the only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open."
from Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk

"You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness."
Jonathan Safran Foer

"Bliss Flight", from my sketchbook, 9/13/09

" The most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid."
J. D. Salinger

"...the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid."
from Nine Stories by J. D. Salinger

"But who can say what's best? That's why you need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. My experience tells me that we get no more than two or three such chances in a life time, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives."
from Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

"Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn't calculate his happiness."
from Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

"War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to 'feel good' about themselves, or their country, is a measure of that failure."
Adrienne Rich

"Our contemporaries are constantly wracked by two warring passions: they feel the need to be led and the desire to remain free. Unable to destroy either of these contrary instincts, they seek to satisfy both at once. They imagine a single, omnipotent, tutelary power, but one that is elected by the citizens. They combine centralization with popular sovereignty. This gives them some respite. They console themselves for being treated as wards by imagining that they have chosen their own protectors. Each individual allows himself to be clapped in chains because that the other end of the chain is held not by a man or a class but by the people themselves.
Alexis de Tocqueville

Those who are not looking for happiness are the most likely to find it, because those who are searching forget that the surest way to be happy is to seek happiness for others."
Martin Luther King Jr.

"Love helps us develop an identity secure enough to allow itself to be placed in another's care and protection."
from White Noise by Don DeLillo

"It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace."
Chuck Palahniuk

"The more you know the less you feel.'
from the song 'City of Blinding Lights' by U2

"Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony."
Mahatma Gandhi

"Perhaps [transgression] is like a flash of lightning in the night which, from the beginning of time, gives a dense and black intensity to the night it denies, which lights up the night from the inside, from top to bottom, yet owes to the dark the stark clarity of its manifestation, its harrowing and poised singularity."
from Language, Counter Memory, Practice by Michel Foucault

"I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream."
Vincent Van Gogh

"And what have I invested in interpreting disfocus for chaos? This threat: the only lesson is to wait. I crouch in the smoggy terminus. The streets lose edges, the rims of thought flake. What have I set myself to fix in this dirty notebook that is not mine? Does the revelation that, though it cannot be done with words, it might be accomplished in some lingual gap, give me the right, in injury, walking with a woman and her dog in pain? Rather the long doubts: that this labor tears up the mind's moorings; that, though life may be important in the scheme, awareness is an imperfect tool with which to face it. To reflect is to fight away the sheets of silver, the carbonated distractions, the feeling that, somehow, a thumb is pressed on the right eye. This exhaustion melts what binds, releases what flows."
from Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany

"Stay?" Loufer's voice neared that other, upsetting tone. "Well, actually, I've thought about that one a lot. I think it has to do with- I got a theory now- freedom. You know, here- " ahead, something moved- "you're free. No laws to break, or to follow. Do anything you want. Which does funny things to you. Very quickly, surprisingly quickly, you become- " they neared another half-lit lamp; what moved became smoke, lobling from a window sill set with glass teeth like an extinguished jack-o-lantern- "exactly who you are." And Tak was visible again. "If you're ready for that, this is where it's at."
from Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany

"The progressive world is necessarily divided into two classes - those who take the best of what there is and enjoy it - and those who wish for something better and try to create it. Without these two classes the world would be badly off. They are the very conditions of progress, both the one and the other. Were none who were discontented with what the have, the world would never reach anything better." from the essay 'Cassandra' by Florence Nightingale

SIGNPOSTS is taking the month of August off.
See you when we return....

"Never regret thy fall,
O Icarus of the fearless flight
For the greatest tragedy of them all
Is never to feel the burning light."
Oscar Wilde

Covalent Bond, 17x11"

from the collection of Wendy and Emily,

Washington DC

"All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him. If it be aristocratic in organization, then it seeks to protect the man who is superior only in law against the man who is superior in fact; if it be democratic, then it seeks to protect the man who is inferior in every way against both. One of its primary functions is to regiment men by force, to make them as much alike as possible and as dependent upon one another as possible, to search out and combat originality among them. All it can see in an original idea is potential change, and hence an invasion of its prerogatives. The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is very apt to spread discontent among those who are."
H.L.Mencken

"Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love."
Rainer Maria Rilke

"I paint to rest from the phenomena of the external world - to pronounce it -- and to make notations of its essences with which to verify the inner eye."
Morris Graves

"To destroy is easier than to create, and that is why so many people are ready to demonstrate against what they reject. But what would they say if one asked them what they wanted instead?"
from Love and Garbage by Ivan Klima

"Our minds, like our bodies, are in continual flux; something is hourly lost, and something acquired.... Do not suffer life to stagnate; it will grow muddy for want of motion: commit yourself again to the current of the world."
Samuel Johnson

"The public wants work which flatters its illusions."
Gustave Flaubert

Enskied, 17x11"

from the collection of Greg,

Annapolis MD

"In no part of the Constitution is more wisdom to be found than in the clause which confides the wisdom of war or peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department...War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement. In war, a physical force is to be created; and it is the executive will which is to direct it. In war the public treasures are to be unlocked; and it is the executive hand which is to dispense them. ...It is in war, finally, that laurels are to be gathered, and it is the executive brow they are to encircle. The strongest passions and most dangerous waeknesses of the human breast; ambition avarice, vanity, the honorable or venial love of fame, all are in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace."
James Madison

"The case for individual freedom rests chiefly on the recognition of the inevitable and universal ignorance of all of us concerning a great many of the factors on which the achievement of our ends and welfare depend. It is because every individual knows so little and, in particular, because we rarely know which of us knows best that we trust the independent and competitive efforts of many to induce the emergence of what we shall want when we see it. Humiliating to human pride as it may be, we must recognize that the advance and even the preservation of civilization are dependent upon a maximum of opportunity for accidents to happen."
Friedrich Hayek

"One writes because one has been touched by the yearning for and the despair of ever touching the Other."
from The Unemployed Fortune Teller by Charles Simic

"The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes."
Andre Gide

Interviewer:
"Why do you think you want to keep these records- all the shirt boards, the notes, and the files? Do you imagine other people reading them or are they just for you?

Gay Talese:
"I haven't given it much thought. I just don't want to throw them away. It's become an obsession with me now. I don't want to give the impression that I have an inflated sense of myself because I do not. But I do think that I am a chronicler. I want to report on what I have seen and heard and people I've known, and what I've done, because I think it's connected to history. I'm interested in leaving my mark. I keep records to testify to the fact that I'm alive."

Interviewer:
"Like the ZT.S.Eliot line, "These fragments I have shorn against my ruins"?

Talese:
"You bring intellectual bearing upon my banality."

from an interview by Katie Riaphe in The Paris Review vol.189

"...I have come to think that life is a far more limited thing than those in the midst of its maelstorm realize. That light shines into the act of life for only the briefest moment-perhaps only a matter of seconds. Once it is gone and failed to grasp its offered revelation, there is no second chance. One may have to live the rest of one's life in hopeless depth of loneliness and remorse. In that twilight world, one can no longer look forward to anything. All that such a person holds in his hands is the withered corpse of what should have been."
from The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

"On a wild night he went through the dark of the apple orchards downriver while a storm swept in and lightning marked him out with his empty sack. The trees reared like horses all about him in the wind and the fruit fell hard on the ground like the disordered clop of hooves.
Suttree stood among the screaming leaves and called the lightning down. It cracked and boomed about and he pointed out the darkened heart within him and asked for light. If there be any art in the weathers of this earth. Or char these bones to coal. If you can, if you can. A blackened rag in the rain.
He sat with his back to a tree and watched the storm move on over the city. Am I a monster, are there monsters in me?"
from Suttree by Cormac McCarthy

In a Field of Clover, 17x11"

from the collection of Greg,

Annapolis, MD

"The virtue of sacrifice is everything and must always exist in necessary moments. Without it, we would not be able to produce good art nor anything else of value in life."
Juan Gris in a letter to Leonce Rosenberg

"A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it."
Frank Herbert

"Civilised life, you know, is based on a huge number of illusions in which we all collaborate willingly. The trouble is we forget after a while that they are illusions and we are deeply shocked when reality is torn down around us."
J.G. Ballard

'Mr. Kiefer sees a vengeful God and "the world as completely wrongly constructed," he said. But beauty can emerge: "If you try to do something you cannot do, it brings you farther, it brings you to something else, even if you fail."'...

'There are days when he paints and hates his work. "It's horrible," he said. "You're desperate, but the next day it becomes, sometimes, beautiful. Because I didn't see what was inside. Desperation is a material for artists."'

from 7/8/09 Steven Erlanger piece in N.Y.Times about Anselm Kiefer nad the new Paris Opera stage sets and costumes.

"A poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses. All forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he exhausts within himself all poisons, and preserves their quintessences. Unspeakable torment, where he will need the greatest faith, a superhuman strength, where he becomes all men the great invalid, the great criminal, the great accursed--and the Supreme Scientist! For he attains the unknown! Because he has cultivated his soul, already rich, more than anyone! He attains the unknown, and if, demented, he finally loses the understanding of his visions, he will at least have seen them! So what if he is destroyed in his ecstatic flight through things unheard of, unnameable: other horrible workers will come; they will begin at the horizons where the first one has fallen!"
Arthur Rimbaud

"We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves.

I wish for all this to be marked on by body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography - to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience."
from The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

"Your memories become fantasies if they are not shared,
and your life in all its triviality becomes a legend."
from The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon

Alley Sunset, 17 x 11"

from the collection of Donna & Steve,

Baltimore, MD

"Whoever separates his life from thought will not last. Whoever wishes to just wander along without thinking will meet his own death before he reaches his desired destination. By taking a step Paul had left the road, and his body followed along easily. The view that the eyes slowly take in tries to seduce him into the unknown. Another step....No hand to point the way. To remain in the unknown would be a good way to simply be. No need to own anything, no need for a grave."
from The Journey by H.G. Adler

"Before all else, the Minotaur was the agent of his own appetite. But sometimes, in philosophical moods, he would think of himself as a messenger bearing this ultimate truth: You were created to be destroyed. That was it. Simple."
from Ziggurat by Stephen O'Connor

"It was dark, and the candle burning in the carriage generated more shadows than light."
from When Nietzsche Wept by Irving Yolom

"The color of the truth is gray."
Andre Gide

"But on bright summer days, in particular, so evenly disposed a luster lay over the whole of Barmouth Bay that the separate surfaces of sand and water, sea and land, earth and sky could no longer be distinguished. All forms and colors were dissolved in a pearl-gray haze; there were no contrasts, no shading anymore, only flowing transitions with the light throbbing through them, a single blur from which only the most fleeting of visions emerged, and strangely- I remember this well- it was the very evanescence of those visions that gave me, at the time, something like a sense of eternity."
from Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald

"The modern artist is working with space and time and expressing his feelings rather than illustrating."
Jackson Pollock

Crow's Nest, 17x11"

"Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision."
Salvador Dali

"An original is a creation motivated by desire. Any reproduction of an original is motivated by necessity. It is marvelous that we are the only species that creates gratuitous forms. To create is divine, to reproduce is human."
Man Ray

"I want what we all want," said Carl. "To move certain parts of the interior of myself into the exterior world, to see if they can be embraced."
from You Don't Love Me Yet by Jonathan Lethem

"Not a breath, not a sound—except at intervals the muffled crackling of stones that the cold was reducing to sand—disturbed the solitude and silence surrounding Janine. After a moment, however, it seemed to her that the sky above her was moving in a sort of slow gyration. In the vast reaches of the dry, cold night, thousands of stars were constantly appearing, and their sparkling icicles, loosened at once, began to slip gradually towards the horizon. Janine could not tear herself away from contemplating those drifting flares. She was turning with them, and the apparently stationary progress little by little identified her with the core of her being, where cold and desire were now vying with each other. Before her the stars were falling one by one and being snuffed out among the stones of the desert, and each time Janine opened a little more to the night. Breathing deeply, she forgot the cold, the dead weight of others, the craziness or stuffiness of life, the long anguish of living and dying. After so many years of mad, aimless fleeing from fear, she had come to a stop at last. At the same time, she seemed to recover her roots and the sap again rose in her body, which had ceased trembling. Her whole belly pressed against the parapet as she strained towards the moving sky; she was merely waiting for her fluttering heart to calm down and establish silence within her. The last stars of the constellations dropped their clusters a little lower on the desert horizon and became still. Then, with unbearable gentleness, the water of night began to fill Janine, drowned the cold, rose gradually from the hidden core of her being and overflowed in wave after wave, rising up even to her mouth full of moans. The next moment, the whole sky stretched out over her, fallen on her back on the cold earth."
Albert Camus