Adhering

It’s important to pay attention: the light, what’s in the frame, the cropping. How it all wants to go, that’s all that really matters.

Adhering to what must be.

*****

When the world no longer makes sense, how do you make sense of it?

(Elisif died. What sense is there in that?)

Here is what I said:

“When something like that happens, it’s like being in a tiny dinghy at the top of a huge dam, and the dam bursts and all you can do is hold on and let the current take you wherever it wants. All you can do is hold on.”

*****

I had to stop painting. I needed a dab of cobalt blue but did not have it in my palette. After hours, no art supply store nearby. I had to stop.

It’s important to pay attention. If just anything will do, then we’re lost.

*****

Piet Mondrian, age 74, decades of rigorous art making behind him, marked by a style of stabilizing horizontal and vertical black lines, encasing rectangles and squares of whites, reds, yellows, and blues. Variations, yes, but always those hard lines. And then: Broadway Boogie-Woogie.

Philip Guston, a career amongst the abstract expressionists, right up there with the likes of deKooning and Pollock. A serious painter. And then: those klansmen in cars, ridicule inevitable.

Alberto Giacometti, a rising star of the Surrealism movement, fundamentalists against realism. And then: a figure drawing sketch (to work things out) necessitates existential pursuit, humiliating expulsion follows.

*****

It’s important to pay attention. Rules don’t apply. Will doesn’t apply. Not even desire. There is only the current. Holding on.

Adhering.