Painting in the Age of Oil

Art belongs to a journey.  While on the road there is no final destination for art .  There is always a new season, another path not yet traveled to its end.   Artist statements are love letters, or ever changing inquiries, logged into an accidental journal, whose entries change week by week, while pages recede into antiquity. 

      I like to imagine that art began in a cave, or on a rock wall, by someone touched by some other presence, a green man or an animal spirit, or star spirits.  Or by a madonna dressed in white or of a countenance black and glowing bright.  Or a wounded healer . . .  What inspired the first artist to lift a stick with blood, or red ochre, and draw the first line of expression in a love letter to the one dancing just beyond our everyday lives? 

Today I paint not with a stick and blood.  Today I paint with a brush, with mostly acrylic paints made from ancient plants, in the age of oil that in time will become a legend for another age where the creative spirit will manifest through other mediums.  I live on a river of ages that is long as it flows through vast shadow lands and past gay, sunny gardens of delight. And the river even meanders past a savannah where elephants burdened, yet uplifted, by an inexplicable longing, paint abstracts across the Milky Way, while solemn monkeys bring them wooden kegs full of juice fermented from wild seed.  It is a place where sometimes I’ll rest for a spell, finding solace in a dream of a mysterious beloved, while hearing a music that draws me ever on to play like a plein air realist in this land of the endless river.  It seems that’s the only way it can be, as a performance, with paintbrush instruments.  So I’ll play on in this age of oil, until ashes fall from the sky and there is no more gasoline to pump.  That’s how I’ll die, into a mystery.

Tomorrow there’ll arise another artist statement as a heron takes flight from a riverside swamp.  I’ll dream the sound of ocean waves and the silence of desert rocks.