Painting Fool...

I read of art and artists, and the folks who write about them will usually point to some specific range of time and say "this was his productive period..." and then launch off into what is known of the artist's life at that time, the events leading up to that time.  Ok, it's taken me a few years to understand that strange habit, the first thing I had to understand was what actually drives someone to paint.  Yea, well, if you're smart (that is to say, not intending to destroy yourself) you paint instead of over indulging in alcohol or other mind shifting things to keep your attention focused on something relatively harmless while dealing on things anything but.  As I write it's give or take OH six hundred hours now (that classic Robbin William's "Goodmorning Viet Nam" OH my God it's to damn early to be awake...), and just to flatter me own vanity I think I'm going to pretend that someday someone might actually give a hoot about my paintings and write something about me, and what the whale, they should have something to work from.



No...a study in brown


This one marks the return of a sad sick memory a few days ago, one from that childhood hell house next door.  The memories are buried, thankfully in some regards I suppose, but buried memories are still memories and will still influence what happens after their making.  The memory that returned was seeing feet in the window, feet on a table, and realizing I'd seen similar several times and the screams were always the most agonizing when you could see feet.   They were caning their victims I'm sure, and caning is a brutal and bruising form of pain.  Even the arab and oriental barbarians who still use it as a form of capital punishment set a count of strokes, somehow I don't think the shitheads next door were counting, somehow I think they'd judge when to quit by when the screams started getting to weak to be entertaining anymore. 

How do I know it's a real memory?  When it crosses my thought everything, and I do mean everything, goes flat gray featureless without color or life, without emotion or motion, time stands still and all I can sense is a pain that reminds me of a heart attack, and then when life and light and motion return it's in a rush of pure rage, an anger beyond describing, which I'm sure is why my sleep schedule these days is rolling like a bowling ball down some ally... a piece of the blocking mechanism failed, and the subconscious is trying to get things back in order before something worse slips the line. 

Right.  No, not right.  As wrong as wrong can be, and I don't give a flying fuck who says otherwise.  Which is why I'm filling my time doing paintings, it's so much safer (and less of a temptation) than going out in the country and burning gunpowder practicing quick draw and rapid fire while trying to paint the face of those disgusting barbarian assholes (who are dead of old age by now, dammit, I want so badly to shoot them just for the satisfaction of watching them die and go to the hell they so ripely deserve) onto the tin cans on the other side of the ravine... yea, it's better to just paint, and plan a less destructive but more devestating way of getting to their heirs and descendents still polluting the world of today.  Painting is a good thing to do while you plan, keeps your hands busy and keeps other folks from asking you what you're up to...