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