Even as a teenager, he was obviously in love with painting, and with paint. There’s probably no 20th century artist other than his contemporary abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock who treated paint more voluptuously, and maybe no one who worked harder to get paint to come alive on a canvas.
Edit. I’m adding this second quote from the same piece because I lucked into hearing the same review on the radio show Fresh Air tonight. I just love this:
Several years after his first big New York success in the late 1940s with a dazzling series of black and white abstractions, he returned to one of his favorite subjects — women — and was attacked for abandoning abstraction. To which he responded: “After a while all kinds of painting becomes just painting for you — abstract or otherwise.”
“Being anti-traditional,” he told his critics, “is just as corny as being traditional.”
Yeah take that all you people who like to divvy up the world to carve yourself a little niche. Maybe we can do more than one thing or more than one style. And maybe we would do well to be a little more inclusive. Or by spending less time worrying about the boundries of what we do, and just doing it.
Finally made it into the sewing room tonight, but frankly despite trying to distract myself with favorite playlists, I was missing my story and the characters.
Got four columns sewn together. Nineteen more to go. And then the rows.
Today’s blog over on NaNoWriMo is worth the price of admission. (yeah I know you thought I’d stop talking about them now, but in fact I spent a spit of time today coming up with a soft ending to my story!). By that, I mean you should go over and read the whole thing. It’s by a staffer who didn’t “win”, getting only a fraction of the word goal set down during the month. But she writes about all the things she gained via the process. And that’s really what the concept is: Sit down regularly, do the work, keep going, do some more work, finish it flaws, warts and all, start over. And trying new things is part of that mix.
To quote one of our esteemed MLs, Saker Pup:
Every time you try something new, you risk failure. That’s why most people who aren’t small children don’t try new things.
They spend their lives creating a routine that will insulate them from doing anything unfamiliar because most people can’t do unfamiliar things perfectly. And if you don’t know exactly what you’re doing all the time, you might accidentally screw something up and fail.
I’ll tell you a secret: I fail at most things, at least at first, and it hasn’t killed me yet.
Failure isn’t something to be afraid of. Failure means I tried.
Failure is the process I must endure before I can achieve success.
Failure is beautiful.
I see this so much in my day to day world. People not-so-old on up will tell me all the reasons why they’re bad at using a computer or whatever and point to the nearest child and say “look at that – a small child can do this better than me.”
Which is true if you don’t try. Kids don’t worry about failure. Kids keep pushing buttons to see how it works, where the thing they need is, how to make the birds fly through the air.
So, so what if you don’t know something. If you want to, you’ll put aside not knowing it for the pleasure of trying it. And if you fail the first time, you’ll try again. And when you succeed, you’ll have that fist-pumping, happy-dancing glory moment to exalt in both the trying and the win.
I suppose you might try and not achieve the success you dream of. Or you might not like it. That’s ok. You’ve kept your ability to try things limber and ready to go.
If you don’t try at all, what have you got? Not much.
The AIDS Quilt/Names Project carries on, remembering those who died from AIDS. The number of panels grows, perhaps not at the same rate it once did, but the whole collection shows no sign of becoming a memory itself.
Weighing 54 tons and composed of more than 47,000 panels dedicated to more than 90,000 individuals, The AIDS Memorial Quilt is the premier symbol of the AIDS pandemic, our greatest HIV prevention education tool and the largest ongoing piece of community folk art in the world.
Speak the truth about AIDS, be safe and remember.
The block above contains the panel (bottom left) that two co-workers and I made to honor the memory of our friend and co-worker Rudy.
Nobody can be exactly like me. Sometimes even I have trouble doing it.
