A person steps into a life’s work. Leaving behind a rubble of false starts, then it arrives. The disappointment was with the sometimes snarky, sometimes “smart” world of conceptual art, art that could be played as a game, a complicated game which was a fun game to watch, to follow the stats, to know a bit about the players, keeping a box score-card as you watched, but really you wanted to be a player on the field, to feel you’ve been dealt in. It felt like being on the inside of something special to be an artist working away in a studio. And, as a youngster you wanted to play the game as it was laid out, a lot of indirection coming from the glossy art mags, dry ole’ Duchamp and beefy sweaty ole’ Picasso dukeing it out in your mind, but there was something subrosa. Some hidden call to talk about spirit and soul. The filament inside the bulb. To be in that world bringing all your on-the-job training to shoulder the wheel of ART along, felt like being in a WPA mural of heroic workers… working your way out of some cul-de-sac caves as part of the journey. If you were an artist you were preparing yourself to head down into some unknown glen. Being an artist can make you feel as if you lived in rarefied land separate from the world. But my connection with the living world had always been a source for sparking inner connections,  growing up in a town with a slow river and a wild-ish woods nearby. “Lets head out, I’ve heard Tule Lake on the Oregon/Cali border is full of birds. Especially in the fall.” I like looking at birds. So did a lot of waterfowl hunters on a similar (but different) trajectory.

The Mt. Shasta watershed is centered on the mountain, of course, but surrounding the mountain is a low-lying sedge land, perfect for rice farming with ample water and also perfect for ducks, geese, and swans. It’s as though Darwin were at work creating a proof of landscape giving rise to speciation. This landscape with the tall peak flowing away on all sides, a dominating two peak volcano, Shasta and Shastina rise purpley blue to 9600 feet from the valley floor. A mountain’s mountain. A distinct shape easy to lock into the mind as a picture. At Tule Lake the view of the mountain is to the south and looking into a late day sky, starting in early November, you can watch skeins of ducks weave back and forth across the sheer light of the sky as it dips into rosey sunset. The purple mountain, a woodblock. Then, standing braced against the wind, at the edge of the water, 10,000 birds burst up all at once, filling your chest with a thrum. Rising up the front of your neck comes a sob, a chortle, some sound you’ve never  heard yourself make. This is it, the only thing to talk about is this. And its been so all of my life since, striding to meet that leafy green heart of beauty, the sunlight going to white on a damp leaf. The laws of nature are compatible with the laws of love.The laws of nature are compatible with the laws of love.

I’d already gotten the call to do this, been called to this, to paint pictures, Its what excited me. I had already passed through the gate of wondering if I was on the right path, but I needed a refresher. The gospel song says TAKE ME BACK TO THE PLACE I FIRST RECEIVED YOU. The shape of the call wears thin after a lot of head-down work in the studio and classroom. I’d worn a groove in the pathway. “I’m a watercolor painter,” I had declared. But I wanted a refresher “A lot of work can be churned out, then shoved aside like a broken-down carnival parade. So, Papa wants a brand new bag. Leanin’ into a groove. It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing…I was at a standoff with myself. So listen, my “call” to paint pictures started as a joke

 Is it worth the effort? Start with hardest to fathom—sure you KNOW its good (maybe because the fancy people say it is) The sly smile of being in the know through increasingly the sales and martketing department had taken over the tower of curated quality. Don’t get me wrong, I truly love the part of the mind/body that can turn art into philosophy, But in the studio it felt like a brick chamber, the walls sweating with damp, trapping the urge to make stuff, locked away in a hot vault, of cool,  I know better. We were at the end of history, weren’t we? The Zero Point. What was there to say? TV and movies was all the visual information you needed. Painting was silly as Barnet Neuman pointed out with his Voice of Fire… You go, “What the…” Mere presence was the point,  painting pictures like the Voice of Fire pointed. The existential moment captured, there is only this, this presence of color. OK, fun to think about and work out the puzzle of: what is this, this “my child could do this”, this so-called painting, is so reveared, and it’s latest auction price hovering in the $40 million range. This is confusing for all of us, but fun for the mind engaged in thinking about art to figure out, as  I had started on a course of fighting even the notion of painting itself—a dead language, I assumed, with the prevailing language of minimalism ruling the roost, minimalism and conceptual art ready in the wings. So I said in 1970 for my senior in college, last class of my undergrad career:

I wrote, for my senior seminar art class (this is 1970)”I propose to move to Cape Cod and learn the art of touristic best seller watercolors and exhibit those watercolors at a fashion-centric, trend setting gallery in NYC..” It would be as a poke in the eye to the high priests guarding the holy sepulcher. Testing the notion of high art/low art. And, bringing  the question of art and high-finance to the front of discussion. I wanted to ask the question raised by this “action” as we called conceptual projects. Projects which would ask and answer questions of value and quality; questions high on the conceptual agenda. “Is this any good at all?” Then 3 years later in grad school seminar I found my advisor had done something similar. Researching the top sellers at the Gump’s Art gallery, Steve Kaltenbach, tried to formulate a top selling painting using their database of what had sold. It was a funny art-world inside joke. But me, I just liked fooling around with stuff, and here were thought experiments, that actually BECAME stuff.  This was just not done. Narrative was out, outrez,  and, I want to do it in watercolor, the medium itself as cheesy and disdained as it gets. Fusty, a has-been medium, an old lady medium, a disdained lavender, queer-world medium.  At least in my mind, the  carnival barker, critic trading on his will to be heard, shouts in the glossy art mags, that art was not about stuff. Maybe Art was lifestyle, maybe art was an idea like say—have your name changed every month for a year, and have it registered legally in the courts as my instructor and advisor Ed Mc Gowin had done, in whose very class I had proposed my vacation watercolor project.  Like McGowin, printing up the court documents and mounting  them on a wall in his gallery, have Betty Parsons sell them,  I would show framed advertisments, and the review in ArtForum. Hey,! whats the big idea? Exactly.  Questions? Yes indeed. Identity and value on the docket at the “Critical Dialogue” court of what’s authentic.

So, there!!!  I abandonded work on my project my project with a watercolor, actually painted while living on Cape Cod where I discovered painting was a  kind of thinking, wholly satisfying. Several years maybe 5 or 6, I’ve waded through all this working stuff as thought  and still, my message and my mantra remain the same: The laws of nature are compatible with the laws of love. The laws of nature are compatible with the laws of love.

Let’s meet Baroness Gloria Von Rysdale who says, “I can only give you what you already possess.” There is so much wisdom floating in the background, the real knowledge lives in the primary processes of consciousness unseen until the pictures are unlocked. How do you unlock this storehouse of Aladdin? Where is the “Open Sesame” key? Who has the key?

YOU have the key! YOU are the Baroness! The key is simply gratitude. As a working artist, isn’t it your desire to show the world the gifts you possess? To be the key for others to open their own Alladin treasure caves? What follows are little vignettes as links that show some examples. My suggestion is that you allow your own mind to dig in the soil of your own experience, then open the links.

Let’s start with a list:

• Movies & Books that have taken you across the invisible line of your own resistance.

Tell the Baroness why you liked a certain movie or book. How did it alter your relationship to your place in the world? Has that experience changed your idea about what is important?

• Teachers who have shown the way. Mud? Mud!

• Landscapes riveted into the brainpan. Sheer of Light

• Art that has become radioactive (in a good way). Art you can’t forget.

Enough of this for now, but now that you are acquainted you can call on her, “Show me a picture, Baroness.” She never fails, so long as you feel gratitude. 

She can only give you what you already possess—you have a treasure house of gifts waiting to be opened, and the most important gift can be the gift of grief. What you have lost, though it is painful, it is the final gift to be grateful for.

I’m wracking my brain to remember where I first heard of “The Navajo Blessing Way” — how to be a human keeping the highest values of being, functioning as part of the life lived. The result would be a Good Person. Doing your best with what you have. And then, passing out whatever gifts you have to others. Blessing Way People are always looking through the lens focused on “doing unto others…” 

My interest stemmed from a period when my  study of world mythology was heightened. There was avid attendance at the Jung Institute’s (SF) lecture series on that particular shelf of self-knowing. Something stuck about the three ways of being in The Blessing Way. To live a life inside one of those Ways it offered—The Medicine Way, The Warrior Way, and The Beauty Way. 

And, recently receiving this photo from my cousin Sara, taken in 1955, I could begin to parse the idea of The Blessing Way through this image. These three children seemed destined and chosen to follow a particular path, destined to be on the blessing way, each in their own individual way. Both in affect and effect…HEALING, POWER and ART.

So here we are sitting under the aegis of the protective father. A lot of Mea Culpa ink has been spilled about the ravages of the unchecked masculine, deservedly so, and a lot of it true, but this picture could be an illustration of the idea that there exists a muscular masculine mind protecting the followers of the Blessing Way, both in affect and effect.

Self-reliance is the theme of this group of genomic fellow travelers. Self reliance— your fate and destiny is up to you. All three of these children forged a life you would recognize as as “wheels rolling out of their own centers.” That’s Nietzsche’s expression—a wheel rolling out of it’s own center—here are an artist, a doctor, a lawyer and a Grand Father forging lives as exemplars of the highest value one is capable of. The point—you are looking at all four people who did what they did navigating via an internal compass, relying on that self-generated compass, making a way in this world. 

David, the doctor — Medicine is the most obvious attribute of The Blessing Way. Imagine Dr. David Lang with his comforting hand on your arm, saying “You’ll be good as new.” Or, “I’m sorry about the pain, but we’ll take care of you the best way we know how.” I sat with David in his boyhood room, at Christmas break, (probably 1964 ) he, fresh from his Psychology 101 class at Yale, spun out a story of the work of Freud. The interpretation of dreams, specifically. I was a high school sophomore  and I was dazzled, sent spinning into a new world of the life of the imagination. By all accounts he is an excellent surgeon, though we’re told a bit of a workaholic.

Michael, the attorney—The law usually the bastion of money and power, changed the conversation from using the club of money, to battle out conflicts—a modern form of hand to hand combat—to using reason to to solve conflicts. He practically invented the art of Mediation and started the first graduate program for accrediting Mediators. In case you think he shied away from power this little moment may be illustrative…He was taunted by a wealthy uncle (the inventor of the plastic raincoat and the Burlington Coat Factory )  At the time, Mike was a lawyer for Legal Services, organizing a rent strike for denizens of Newark NJ. Uncle Fred says, “When are you going to come to reality and stop all this helping the poor and be a real lawyer?” “Fuck you, old man…” sometimes a shortcut between spirit and flesh is required.

Richard, the artist— I was a little defensive about my choice for The Beauty Way: 1) because I’m having entirely too much fun doing what I do every day, (if you call wrestling with angels fun…I do.) I’m awake every night at 3 AM ready to take dictation as my bedroom becomes the mountain top observatory. Those angels come flying in. Can you hear the weighty doors of the mind at 3 AM rolling aside to give that sliver of blackness, speckled with stars, access to the heavens? By what authority is this access given? Good question. 2) Because I feel special access has been given. (Not without struggle—did I mention wrestling with Angels?) To bring ideas, existing like the cyphers of math formulae, on the blackboard of the Institute of Advanced Studies, indecipherable to the uninitiated and bring that information into the world as beauty and form. To make a picture of thought, full of meaning, all on the great conveyer of culture. And then, dedicating a life to helping others by teaching and creating an institution where others could be expressive and enter the market place for making a living.

Paul, the Grandfather — The progenitor of all this Blessing Business is the guy on top.  Came here on the immigrant train (boat) fleeing a village where all the Jewish inhabitants would eventually be wiped out. That village, Kvarsk, Lithuania is memorialized at the Holocaust Museum. Papa brought well over 100 people to safety. As a kid, you felt protected as well as presented with a sea-mark to lay a course by. Excellence of spirit and action will alway be required. He had zero tolerance for the indolent. He had studied to be a Rabbi in the old country and in those politically fraught times had aligned himself with the Menshivicks, a faction most liberal, in opposition to the violence- prone Bolshivics. On the boat ride over he learned his first English idiom—”Time is money.”

OK, I confess, I have visions. Why does this feel like a confession and not an exaltation? I guess because I come from a family of very practical people. The patriarch had escaped Czarist mayhem for Jews and worked hard to create a walled city of capital to keep those he cared for insulated from mayhem, Czarist or otherwise. When I told him I would not be coming into the business and going to art school he backed away as though confronting an insane person, unpredictable and capable of creating his own mayhem. “You are leaving a goldmine.” So I was a little equivocal about my visions. It was bad enough to make pictures for a living… I reveled in seeing music and tasting color (which helps out in the kitchen). I sometimes like walking in the woods barefoot on a warm day so to better feel the underfoot as a mental map of texture…I was used to mind pictures, using this to form and reform stuff into the sculptures I would make. It was a a labor saving device. This sense I’ve since found out is called synesthesia. I thought everyone was like this and probably is to varying degrees. But one evening it came from a different order of mind.

First I should probably say, that along the countercultural meander, psychotropic drugs were often offered and sometimes used to mostly vivid and positive effect. But this little vignette takes place in a period after son Noah was a born and was a crawling around little tyke. Laura and I had pledged not to do drugs or alcohol while we we were trying to figure out what having a child to raise up meant to our general behavior. This is the long way of saying that this experience was on the “natch.”

Noah was eight months old and a really adventurous and generally charming child. Friends visiting, up from Chicago were curious and dubious about this new state of affairs. Baby?? What’s that got to do with making art? We were all hardcore and dedicated in our cohort and knew no one else in their mid-twenties attempting children plus a life of art making. 

At this point we were winding up our stay in Madison—we’d left our little place in the country, though we adored growing a garden, both of us. Wisconsin winters will box the —“Yippie! Country Living,” right out of you. So we had moved into married Student Housing for our final semester.

Our friends were art grad students at the U of Chicago. We loved arguing about art—art vs craft, Conceptual art vs whatever. It was a strange time in the arts. The Modern Project was over. What’s next? The baby was not having it so I went into the bedroom to see if I could get him to sleep. Sitting in the rocker, I started my breathing exercises….calm calm, saying my mantra (of course, I had a mantra, didn’t you?). The baby finally slumps into that increase of gravity every parent knows.

It began with an increase in my own gravitational pull, hands becoming heavy, feeling huge, then the whole body began to feel heavy. My hands then felt like my whole body was in my hands, then there was a lifting. Yikes! What’s happening? Calm calm breathe breathe. My heart was thumping panic as I began to lift from the rocker.  Calm calm breathe breathe…mantra mantra…I was floating near the ceiling, seeing myself seated in the rocker. Then, as though disembodied into atoms, up and through the ceiling to seeing the complex of apartments and further into the night sky looking over the planet then up further into a fizz of bubbles where I became a bubble among a zillion bubbles. Happy? It was a feeling akin to falling in love and having the feeling returned, then “oh gosh, we have company…” The feeling of dropping 20 floors all at once and I was back in the rocker. And out to join the company…how long have I been gone? Fifty years, I think, as I write this fifty years later.

My rapture with the image of The Tetons reflected in Jenny Lake became three-dimensional when I hiked with a pal Chris, up and around and back down — the Peak of Grand Teton. 

Chris and I were at the end of a year-plus trail of experimental “life style.” Our little band of communards had just broken up when we set out on our “Hike.” We’d driven all the way from Cape Cod. We were to rendezvous with the others in the Tetons but checking in by phone to make final the meet-up itinerary…“We’re not coming…” long empty hiss then    silence.

It was a moment on the life journey when the trajectory shifts. Abruptly. The hopes for a future filled with a happily-ever-after commune had been dashed. Happily living on the land, living a life off the grid, at least off the grid enough to feel some separation from the detested world of eco-destruction and the soul-numbing fog of advertising. It was wishful thinking…that we could solve the world’s problems, with lifestyle alone. In grad school for sculpture I had minored at the AG school in vegetable production working on my merit badge for self-sufficiency. On Cape Cod, where we had rented a big house to fit us all, I learned the rudiments of old-time construction, specializing in post and beam barn raising. I was ready for the “New Age”, my new age anyway. My tool kit ready. 

We didn’t know it, but you could (kinda) have felt it. The Aquarian “Wave” had crested. Ten million dollars worth of Huey helicopters were shoved off the flight deck of the USS Midway. Nixon was a month from resignation. Gas prices tripled overnight.

On our 3-day backpack trip, we would hike up to a lake behind the wall-like front of Grand Teton Mountain and back down Cascade Canyon. It was a moment for deciding, We vowed to ourselves the hike would decide if we would push on to the California Promised Land or go back East. It turned out to be a tricky trail both the journey west and the hike up the mountain. A psyche in its mid-twenties carries a lot of goof-ball enthusiasm slathered with hubris. Our bibliography included Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, The Strout Realty Catalogue, Be Here Now, and some volume or another in the Carlos Castaneda library of shamanic mysticism.  Journey to Ixtlan comes to mind. We ran into a couple of snowy impasses and then a rocky tooth where we had to haul our packs on ropes up and over. “Just don’t look down!” On the trail up, we saw one hapless chap, shouldered by his companions, cross-eyed and stumbling with the effects of a concussion from a bad tumble. 

On our first overnight on the mountain we were refreshed from the crushed travel in our VW counterculture conestoga, The hard hike got us charged-up; with that mini-triumph getting us to the backside of Teton Peak. The adventure getting us through the pass, kicked open the doors to a little Shangri-la. A series of alpine glacial lakes, aqua and milky from the ice grinding the native granite to powder, invited us to linger and lunch. Breathtaking breathtaking breathtaking, swim in ice-bound water, washed our disappointment at the dream differed, up into the cobalt sky.

It came unbidden, sitting there on the shoreline.The vision of ribboned gift boxes rising out of the lake, one after another. In school, I had counted on visions like this, and learned a secret or two for getting those hidden fish of the mind to rise hungry for chum, now here comes a year of carrying cement block and cutting 16” beams slapping the vision right out of you. A year of hard-labor blew my smokey visions into tatters. And now just like that, Ta Da ! A line of unending presents waiting to be opened… “just what I always wanted”… and going on forever…

In 1962 on a family car-trip west, I had seen in Jenny Lake the sublime scene of mountains reflected in still water which transformed into a riveting vision. The saw-tooth peaks doubled in the mirror of a lake became the toothy maws of two dogs, mouth to mouth. In school I had seen this vision transform to become an opening into another world. That ridge line, doubled in the lake, described, pretty well, a gateway into another world. The line, thin, like the cambium layer under the papery bark of a twig, or maybe the surface tension on water—the thinnest of lines separating one world from another.

Sitting by the mountain lake, in my mind’s eye, I saw a slip of writing hidden, in the first box landing opened lying at my feet. “Lake Santa at the Edge of Never…” This is what came to me… “Lake Santa at the Edge of Never…” Then the gift box rose up and lifted into the clear blue at 9,500 feet, followed by another and another, winding around Grand Teton Peak, floating off all the way to California—a cavalry of marching surprises gaily wrapped waiting to be opened.

It’s taken me some fifty years to figure out the depth of that Lake Santa experience. Fifty years of climbing up over around through various stones and rockfalls, and into caves, maybe, blocking my progress. It seems over coming obstacles is a kind of Pilates of the spirit, finding your way via the pictures in the mind, the core of the mind getting in shape…and… if impediments to progress are seen as strengthening, you can approach a wall, knowing it is there to help you—eventually you get to recognizing the mind as a self-generated personal trainer.

So to hold the mystery of the unseen, what you see when you close your eyes. So this very vision came to me, sometimes it seems pretty flimsy in its pretense, but somehow it holds tight to an alcove in my mind, explicated with this interpretive sign. So here we go, let’s journey to The Edge of Never.

First gift from Lake Santa

The fact of me drawing again is a tremendous gift. I’d had a twelve year layoff first, because I was too busy with the business of being impresario to other artists, busy enough to slow production of my own hand-made stuff to an ooze. And then, with increasing disability via a nerve disorder, I gave it up altogether. “Hey, Gramping, why are your hands are so wiggly?” It was OK, I had plenty of discards and abandoned scraps to arrange and rearrange to make my stories. “I don’t draw anymore.” was my motto and mantra and now, the first gift from Lake Santa comes the gift of me drawing again. This is not a great drawing, or maybe not even a good one, but the fact of it says to me, ”go ahead.” What a gift…for true.