Select Paintings + JOURNAL 2023 Edition
Tune In. Turn On. Drop Out.
/Timothy Leary (1920 - 1996)
I see my life as an experiment in awareness.
/Ram Dass (1931 - 2019)
Through exhaust fumes comes the scent of rotting apples
full of acrid melancholy and heavy metals.
If Friedrich Schiller were walking here and not me, he might compose new xenias
(or an elegy) —
but even fortune’s darling, the Muses’ favorite, privy councillor Goethe entertains elsewhere today.
/Ryszard Krynicki (Excerpt from Pigeons - Magnetic Point: Select Poems 1968-2014) (Translation by Clare Cavanagh)
People use each other as a healing for their pain.
They put each other on their existential wounds, on eye, on cunt, on mouth and open hand.
They hold each other hard and won’t let go.
/Yehuda Amichai (1924 - 2000) (People Use Each Other - Love Poems - 1981)
Regenerative experiences: Plunge into the sea. The Sun. An old city. Silence.
/Susan Sontag (1933 - 2004) (Excerpt from As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals & Notebooks 1964 to 1980 - 2012)
My work comes from the experience of crowds, injustice and aggression
[…]
I feel an affinity for art when it was made as a form of existence, like when shamans worked in the territory between man and unknown powers.
/Magdalena Abakanowicz (1930 - 2017)
At day’s end, the whole sky, vast, unstinting, flooded with transparent mauve, tint of wisteria, cloudless over the malls, the industrial parks, the homes with the lights going on, the homeless arranging their bundles.
Who can utter the poignance of all that is constantly threatened, invaded, expended and constantly nevertheless persists in beauty, tranquil as this young moon just risen and slowly drinking light from the vanished sun.
Who can utter the praise of such generosity or the shame?
/Denise Levertov (1923 - 1997) (Excerpt from In California, Morning, Evening, late January - The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov - 2013)
Nature may be speechless, without language, in the human sense; but nature is highly articulate.
Discourse is only one process of articulation.
/Donna Haraway (Excerpt from The Haraway Reader - 2013)
Luminosity and transparency. The space I have lived in and where I have been able to fulfill myself is defined by these two states.
/Odysseus Elytis (1911 - 1996) (Excerpt from acceptance speech for Nobel Prize in Literature - 1979) (via)
Here again,
shifting days,
on the street.
The people of my life
faded,
last night’s dreams,
echoes now.
The vivid sky, blue,
sitting here in the sun —
could I let it go?
/Robert Creeley (1926 - 2005) (Excerpt from Wellington - The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley: 1975-2005 - 2008)
Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air.
/Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882)
fractured yellow, green & Indian red — distance as fragments
time as displacement of memory.
I close my eyes as a blur of hot afternoon sun expands overhead —
what
do
you
see?
/MP
I light a rose incense.
we lay out a spread of cheeses, breaking off pieces of a baguette washed down with a malbec made with organic grapes.
intermittently digging into a bowl of loose greens/herbs to balance/refresh our palate.
I was reading about Giacometti earlier.
we begin talking about the artists of that period.
we have it so much better now than they ever did.
why? the reason a lot of intellectuals back then fell into the trap of wanting communism is because the job market was an absolute nightmare — insanely limited (extremely narrow) range of available career options.
cheers
to
expanding
possibilities.
/MP
The silence on the floor of my house
Is all the questions and all the answers that have been known in the world
The sentimental furniture threatens the peace
The reflection of a sunset speaks loudly of days
- Agnes Martin (1912 - 2004) (Excerpt from Agnes Martin: Writings - 1998)
I’m an empty mind. When something comes into it, you can see it.
/Agnes Martin (1912 - 2004) (Excerpt from interview with Chuck Smith and Sono Kuwayama - 1997)
The poet, therefore, is truly the thief of fire.
He is responsible for humanity, for animals even; he will have to make sure his visions can be smelled, fondled, listened to; if what he brings back from beyond has form, he gives it form; if it has none, he gives it none.
A language must be found
[…]
of the soul, for the soul and will include everything: perfumes, sounds, colors, thought grappling with thought.
/Arthur Rimbaud (1854 - 1891)
Cities have often been compared to language: you can read a city, it’s said, as you read a book. But the metaphor can be inverted. The journeys we make during the reading of a book trace out, in some way, the private spaces we inhabit.
There are texts that will always be our dead-end streets; fragments that will be bridges; words that will be like the scaffolding that protects fragile constructions.
T.S. Eliot: a plant growing in the debris of a ruined building; Salvador Novo: a tree-lined street transformed into an expressway; Tomas Segovia: a boulevard, a breath of air; Roberto Bolaño: a rooftop terrace; Isabel Allende: a (magically real) shopping mall; Gilles Deleuze: a summit; and Jacques Derrida: a pothole. Robert Walser: a chink in the wall, for looking through to the other side; Charles Baudelaire: a waiting room; Hannah Arendt: a tower, an Archimedean point; Martin Heidegger: a cul-de-sac; Walter Benjamin: a one-way street walked down against the flow.
/Valeria Luiselli (Excerpt from Relingos: The Cartography of Empty Spaces - 2013)
[Alejandra] Pizarnik’s deepest obsessions: the limitation of language, silence, the body, night, the nature of intimacy, madness, death.
/Patricio Ferrari (Excerpt from the Introduction to The Galloping Hour: French Poems - 2018)
wet skin, fresh eyes —
fresh air accentuated by lightly falling rain.
an endless expanse of sky, ocean & sand, along with a diffuse outline of lush dunes.
warm touch, smiling, bursts of laughter, each other’s familiar movement & glances —
a blur of beauty imprints our visual cortex.
we sit down now for an afternoon drink on a sparsely filled, covered outdoor terrace —
no urgency for any words to be spoken.
/MP
You are going to ask: and where are the lilacs?
and the poppy-petalled metaphysics?
and the rain repeatedly spattering
its words and drilling them full
of apertures and birds?
I’ll tell you all the news.
I lived in a suburb,
a suburb of Madrid, with bells,
and clocks, and trees.
From there you could look out
over Castille’s dry face:
a leather ocean.
My house was called
the house of flowers, because in every cranny
geraniums burst: it was
a good-looking house
with its dogs and children.
Remember, Raul?
Eh, Rafel? Federico, do you remember
from under the ground
my balconies on which
the light of June drowned flowers in your mouth?
/Pablo Neruda (1904 - 1973) (Excerpt from I’m Explaining A Few Things - Selected Poems - 1990) (Translation by Nathaniel Tarn & Anthony Kerrigan)
JE: As your experience about writing accrues, what would you say increases with knowledge?
JB: You learn how little you know. It becomes much more difficult because the hardest thing in the world is simplicity. And the most fearful thing, too.
It becomes more difficult because you have to strip yourself of all your disguises, some of which you didn’t know you had. You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
/James Baldwin (1924 - 1987) (Excerpt from Paris Review Issue 91 - 1984) (via)
I can still see the blue eyes of German tourists
Discussing society over their beers.
Their thoughtful ‘Ach so’s, slightly nervous perhaps
Crossed the fresh air, they filled several tables.
A few chemistry friends chatted on my left: New perspectives in organic synthesis!
Chemistry makes you happy, poetry makes you sad,
We would have to arrive at a single science.
Molecular structure, philosophy of the self
And the absurd fate of the last architects;
Society rots, decomposes into sects;
Let’s sing hallelujah for the return of the king!
/Michel Houellebecq (Afternoon on the Boulevard Pasteur - Unreconciled: Poems 1991-2013) (Translation by Gavin Bowd)
They wanted to blossom,
and blossoming is being beautiful. But we want to ripen,
and this means being dark and taking pains.
/Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 - 1926) (Excerpt from The Poetry of Rilke - 2011) (Translation by Edward Snow)
I like your letters like whiskey and cherries and smoke and honey.
/Dylan Thomas (1914 - 1953) (Excerpt from a letter to Emily Holmes Coleman c. February 1937) (via)
I used to layer the paint more heavily (Nadja at Le Sancerre) but now I paint on raw canvas, priming the reverse-side.
If you enjoy abstract paintings, what’s remarkable when you view the new paintings in-person on display is how visceral the gestures are without the canvas being heavily layered — took me years to organically evolve/develop. /MP
