i recently spent a morning in bed, just listening to the silence. falling in an out of sleep, and feeling my surroundings. the morning light casting a beam across the floor. its amazing how much more heightened your senses become if you aren't trying to fill the space with sound. i could feel the warmth of the body next to me, see him breathing. taking speech out of the equation opens up all of the other sounds we forget too. i could hear the dog in the living room, sniffing. its a lot like meditation or yoga. you become aware of your body. aware of the space you take up, and the sensations that you feel. i could feel my breath and hear his heart beat. the silence of that morning has made me think about taking time to relish in quietness.
the past months have brought a change in the world. our hemisphere is getting ready for sleep, and there seems to be more silence in the winter months. snow is an insulator, and for some reason, the cold sucks the sound as well as the breath out of you. quietly sitting, i listen to the sound of my pencil on the paper, and the brush on the canvas. a wet brush has a much different sound than a dry one. the scratch of the stylus on a board. these are the sounds of my trade. i get lost sounds. so many tiny noises that bring me joy. the sound of knuckles cracking, rain, a zipper, a deep breath or sigh.
sighs are like silence, they can mean so many things. taking a feeling and interpreting it into a visual representation is an amazing thing. how do you show the silence of post-coital bliss? or the sigh just before you say goodbye? sometimes my mind goes faster than my mouth, or my hands. i work hard to capture a moment in my work, but in the end everything is transient and impermanent. feelings are fleeting and change is the only constant. the beauty in art is being able to hold on to that moment and share it with others, to bring them into me for that instant, then let them go. if you could relive a smell, or sound, wouldn't you?
und story to create a history, or they came up with a conclusion that happened after the credits. there are a lot of these type of art pieces around, it has become this surreal "other" reality with characters in various different activities... Brandon Bird does this effectively, but i feel that his work is largely absurd. in this pic, ian mckellan, as magneto, is covered with gerbils. not to say it isn't a great painting, but i think there could be something else. so, now i have the red knight and the cosmos and it is good. so back to honesty, and the policy of truth. as it turns out jon and i have been the unwitting participants in stolen goods transfer... we bought a macbook from e-bay recently, after about a week it died. jon took it to the apple store to get it checked out, it was under warranty so they said they could fix it, however the hard drive was 60 gigs and all they had was 160 gigs. i thought this was our lucky day because they gave it to us for free! well, on his way home he got a call from apple corporate, this guy tells him that the computer was stolen from a shipment in california, and wanted to know where we got it. jon gave him all of the info h had, e-mails, paypal info, shipping and tracking numbers, etc. this guy was so impressed by jon's honesty that he told the apple store to hook us up and fix the laptop! this situation is totally interesting because they could have just kept the stolen merchandise. so now we have a sweet up-graded computer and might have helped catch a criminal. so, believe in the policy of truth! that is all.
