Struck with the Questions or Take this Hammer...

Well I'm feeling a bit wordy today so forgive for this long post.

Before I get on my soap box check out Flickr for my Illustration Friday submission.

Now...this morning I woke up with an affliction I'll call "Being Struck with the Questions". And I warn you...this is a snippet to how my brain works...you've been warned. (At least I didn't follow James Joyce and publish it in a novel...)

Now it's simple really. I wake up inspired and after I've been up awhile the questions strike. Not bad questions...just random thoughts that pop around in my brain and have to come out. It could be things I need to work on, where I'm going (literally and metaphorically) and the great questions of the universe that may never be answered adequately...

What kind of questions you ask? Here's a sample:

*Note some of these "questions" are more likely statements or random jargon that is posed in a questioning manner...okay, here goes...

Warning again...this is non-linear and goes it a hundred different directions...

Is a "style" simply repeating the same thing over and over again in different ways?

Orpheus--as a mirror of himself? Is he a narcissist?

Beauty in decay? and Destruction as aid to creation? (These are old questions but were brought back to mind last night at a poetry reading.)

Woodie Guthrie?

This may seem odd, but I watched parts of Bound to Glory yesterday and read a few chapters of the book by the same title. Great words and images stream from this book. But this makes me think of the dust bowl and how it can be imagined through art...

literally--as in images of the era and people

"embodied"--exploring the feelings of panic and desperation...these painting aren't necessarily figurative or abstract but a combination of all these things to provide a new perspective of an event.

This train of thought leads me to...

Is there a place left in the world for Van Gogh? Simply meaning in a world where everyone is connected...is anyone or anything left unseen? I feel like yes...because there is so much we forget so much faster...we seem more isolated, more alone and more forgotten.

Which leads to....

Have we reached the age where Andy Warhol claimed we'd all be famous for 15 minutes? What does this say about fame? (a topic also broached during the reading last night) Why do we give it the weight and importance that we do? It's all imagery and glitter and lies. Actors (for a famous example) go broke all the time...but we don't hear those stories....we hid our sorry secrets, scary thoughts and reality under the rug and trample on them hoping to crush them...not that everything is terrible...it's not....but this way of looking is unbalanced...we have glorious images and the grass is greener on the other side shoved at us all the time that we forget that sometimes we're stuck with the dust...we don't know how to deal with the negative stuff because it's not supposed to be real...the glitter, the masks, the shining glory is supposed to be real...and it is...but it also casts a shadow but we forget to look at it...

Balance. Oh, Lord, don't we need it. Too much darkness....too much lightness....never good. Balance.

Maybe this is why I've been drawn to music like the blues, people like Woodie Guthrie, folk art and all of the "human" things.....it's an anecdote to the saccharine medicine that makes us feel like everything will be PERFECT....because it's not...but that's okay...it's not supposed to be...there's duality in nature...sun/moon, birth/death, creation/destruction....why should it be any different for humans?Why do we try to force one thing or the other? Why do we fight the duality, the cycles? Give too much to one or the other...

Remember I told you...soapbox....

Maybe my painting up there is a good image for all this....

It's inspired by the song "Take this Hammer..."

Now I know literally it's a prison song about escaping a chain gang...

But for me it is multi-faceted. I stuck with an image of a bird flying from the thorns. Which can be seen literally as escaping thorns or..... you can see so much more and thinking of the song....hear so much more.

What are the thorns? How and where are you flying? Is is light or dark or both?

Take this hammer, carry it to the captain.

Tell him I'm gone.

If he asks you was I running, tell him I was flying...

Tell him I'm gone.