Lost Art.

I keep thinking about passages.

Especially this ongoing trend where DJ's sample long lost riffs of pop songs, turning the familiar tracks inside out and upside down, into something new and borrowed, as if this act of creating a marriage of song will reinvent the medium.

Often their efforts are successful.

I also keep thinking...

That I, even while stationary, I'm hardly standing still, that time is speeding up, and that I have no destination outside of the next moment. I think about serenity and landscape, a good view verses a crowded one, and what I'd like the rest of my life to look like. I don't spend as much time dreaming as I once did, thinking on some idea and visualizing it, trying to make it commercially sustainable or implementing it to fit with how I think the world should look.

I've been losing my near vision, and yet as I sketch things out on paper, I just let the pencil go where it will and eventually, by holding the paper close, I can see what I've created and whether its crap or not.  Art from a distance is often not as compelling as art under a microscope even as some theorists might beg to differ.

I have never posted this link, but here is a path to a blog I created many years back, just so I'd have access to all the work I've given away over the years. 

http://sketchy-trails.blogspot.com

Whether I draw with a recipient in mind, or whip something out while sitting around a campfire, art for me is generosity expressed and love laid down on canvas, on paper, or even on a mash mix.

When I create, it's a way I can show someone just how much they mean to me.  Art isn't just for galleries. Art is not static, but it is deeply personal and I see creative expression, in whatever form it takes, as intended to be framed, and hung, treasured, or as a way to love on friends. Or say thanks to strangers because something they've done really meant something to me.  Last year in Santa Fe, I was so moved by the music group Over the Rhine I had to sketch something for them.  Their music hits me in a way few artist work has.

One of the pics I created is linked in the blog, pictured above, and it's a sketch of an old Colorado Homestead. I created it for my friend Donnie, who one night while we camped up in the Selkirks, as he watched me working on another piece, Donnie asked me if I could sketch a photograph. Of a home he'd once lived in as a child.

Sure, how hard can a house be to put down on paper.  He explained that house was special because as a young boy he would be taken from that sacred place and later he found himself adopted out as a foster kid over 1500 miles away. He became a great cowboy, and a trick horse trainer---and his travels took him far away from that first home.  But he kept an old photograph of it so that he might remember a way back.

Now just so you know that when he approached me that night around a sparking campfire, I already knew Donnie to be a man who never asked anything of anyone. It had to mean something bigtime to the man and I was honored that he'd asked me if I could recreate this place for him. 

So I took the photograph and tried to remain true to this first home, and I will never forget the expression on his face when I handed him that sketch back, along with the original photograph. I hoped that what appeared on a simple sketch pad paper  returned something back of his childhood to him---a guy who'd lived as such an example to so many. 

Unfortunately Donnie drowned in his well a year and a half later, but I can easily say that in his gentle attitude, the way he absolutely loved and adored his family and the way he loved on and was true to his wife Phyllis, in all that, I learned a lot from him.  He gave me far more than I gave him, and with art, it's always been an equation that equals out that way for me.  

I'm not a wealthy guy, but I am richer than almost anyone I know because I've been fortunate enough to have so many good people cross my path. I don't own any of my work and I guess I've done over a thousand little sketches over the years. It's all been given away, and across the west I know hundreds of people have little bits of lead hanging on their walls, with tiny frames surrounding each piece, and even smaller signatures that are followed with a copyright sign next to them. Oh yeah and a note that often says 1 of 1. 

Because that's how it is supposed to be.  They are one of one.  And they've changed me in countless ways.  And it seemed important to give back, one line at a time.

I've been told that "art isn't art if it sells". I guess I can claim my stuff is officially "art" cus I've never made a dime off of it. But it, this gift of lead turning paper 3 d, it has time after time made me a very rich man.  I just hope I can continue to create and love on people via a pencil.  Vision or no vision.

I say all this because I know that in the west we are finally emerging from winter. All these local art festivals are now in full swing through out the country.  :Lot's of folks love on paper, on clay, and on canvas. Lot's of folks turn forgotten scraps of wood into furniture or carve it up with a chainsaw.  So let me make a suggestion.  Put some good tunes on in the car. Load up the kids or the Sonic Gift Card or maybe make it a first date and grab someone you'd love to one day love on and visit one of them festivals.  Maybe even, if something strikes you, put a few dollars down.  And maybe bring something home that is created to love on you.  Yeah I know, that purchased art sorta violates the princilpe--that cus its sold, it ain't art. Or maybe it still is, simply because its shining all over you.