Swallows at Dusk in Rome

I don't much care for the concept of art therapy. I mean, c'mon - dominant operative word THERAPY, subordinate art, eh!? It's okay, though, twiddling with paint is cool if that's what calms you down and tells your secrets. And, true enough, when I paint I do feel a deep sense of quiet, even when I am fighting with a passage and I can't quite torque the color or manipulate the mass in just the way I want.

When I paint I feel a delicious, pristine emptiness as my conscious and unconscious mind meet and give control over to my eye.

My eye makes the choices, directs the movements of my fingers, all of my muscles to accommodate the development of the canvas. My eye wants a particle of cad, a fading pressure short-stroke from a corner loaded brush with a slight drop of the wrist and a minute roll of the index finger turning the brush slightly over my thumb as my elbow rises - all in 3/8 of an inch, all without conscious thought. That kind of emptiness and freedom from thought and judgement is a marvel. It is bliss.

It leaves me with the same feeling of total detachment from the mundane one experiences when silently watching the mystery of the swallows swarm and roil at dusk over Rome. So, I guess in that sense the act of painting does serve as a fine and elegant, not therapy, but re-ordering of the mind. In those marvelous, empty moments concepts grander than I break the conscious mind's churlish grip on the petty habit of shabby selfish absorption.

Lately it's been harder, though, to get to that quiet, parasensuality of mindful, active emptiness. I'm wasting from something that's not yet defined. Tremors and great weakness, weight falling off like spoiled, unpicked fruit. And worst, the fear of trusting disinterested strangers whose vocabularies are limited to things like- 'too early to panic', this or that test, scans and scopes and 'soon' and 'patience' and 'can't until at least November.'

When I paint I am clear. I am simultaneously abstraction in form and concretion in act - a wonderful conundrum. Dichotomy is all of art - no bright without dull, no light without dark, no mass without void, order to madness, beauty expressing the most hideous aspects of humanity, ugliness that overwhelms with beauty of statement. And right now that is mostly denied me. I am exhausted and worn.

Without my paints I'm a dark French comedy. A weak guy, lately stooped, shuffling through the market for something bland and high calorie .

When I am at the easel I'm me, I am expanded and resonant, I disappear into the whole of things.

Making art isn't therapy....it's being.