Missing Painting?

So, in my office at The Ahmanson Theatre I have some of my paintings hanging on the walls. Yesterday when I went to work one of the paintings was missing. I was in a slight panic thinking it has been stolen. My friend and co-worker Ann found it behind the support beam, behind the door as it is when the door is propped open. I was baffled. I am the only one who has a key. Well, actually security has a key, but to be honest they have no idea which key it is. The lock was put in special when they built my office. The few times I have left my keys at home or in my car and asked security to open it, several minutes of fumbling and hunting for which one fits made me realize that no one would ever go in there. Note...this means the cleaning staff never goes in either, which means I have been cleaning my own office for the last year (gratefully, not a complaint). Said painting is hung on the wall to the right of my HD monitor, behind a sculpture and two other small paintings that lean against it. In order for this painting to "fall down" all this other stuff would need to have fallen also. When I opened my door last night I saw right away that the sculpture, one of my "Delicate Balance" sculptures was on its side. I made the Delicate Balance scupltures after 9-11 as a reminder of just that. We all reside in a very delicate balance. I have most of them at my studio, up on shelves. I call them my earthquake detectors. They are figures that stand on a precarious balance. They have never toppled even when we had a 4.9-something earthquake...I also noticed that the two paintings that lean against it were more forward than normal, but I didn't notice the big painting that was gone from the wall, until a few minutes later when I was like "what's missing here?" "OMG where is the black and white Shell Reversal painting?" One of my dressers asked if it was one of my 9-11 paintings. When I confirmed it was, she said she felt it had to do with the truth of 9-11 being revealed...hopefully. Then Ann found the painting behind the post, behind the door. I put the painting in a new place on another shelf, this time not hanging it.
I work with a lot of very special souls. Psychic, healers, yoga instructors, astrologers...all on the cosmic wavelength.
It can be tricky working with such aware souls. Sometimes it brings in so many unseen energy/souls/time jumps that we have to constantly check in with each other. "Where are you, did you get that?"
LOL
I like living in the realm of magic, possibility, spirituality...it reminds me of the special place we inhabit. It is so brief, and it also lasts forever.
I don't know why my painting was in another place. Science so easily removes the magic, all inexplainable things can be explained away because the mind doesn't want to live in a place of unknown. But it is all unknown. For me 9-11 remains a reminder of the beginning of the our last chance to understand: You can't chase money. People, their lives, their connections are all that matter. It was the World Trade Center after all. Occupy Wall Street is its child. And like any child, they are here to show you where you are wrong. Your faults, your misguided and misplaced focus. Your lack of self awareness. Your lack of self love. My experience with our daughter Marlow reminds me of this daily. She is two. Terrible? No, not by a long shot. Oh, yes I joke about it, but I am taking it very seriously. She guides me to do better. Not unlike the White Spirit I encountered in our house last night who said to me, "Do good work."
It was both a statement of acknowledgement, and a command. It brings tears to my eyes to hear it in my head over and over again. It is I think the next line after "love one another."
We need to do better, we need honesty, we need to Do Good Work.

Shell Reversal Black/White

18" x 30"

Oil, Oil Stick on Cardboard

2011

with various ephemera on shelf in front:

Sketch of Starpeople

Study for Amerika

Delicate Balance scuplture "Showgirl"

Occult

Striving to create new work is a lifelong goal. After all the work that has been created and produced I wonder, "is there anything left to do?" I know, I know... like I said here in the beginning, "not been said by you though, George." However the desire to create something that opens a new vision, a new idea, is so compelling that it is always at the back of my mind when I work. All that comes is from what I have seen before, just distilled and computed by my creative self into a new series...and then through that it is new in that it came from me, directly, honestly, compelled by a force in me that strives to make something that hasn't been made before.
There are those accidents that spill out. Like Kate Bush sings in An Architect's Dream:

Watching the painter painting

And all the time, the light is changing

And he keeps painting

That bit there, it was an accident

But he's so pleased

It's the best mistake, he could make

And it's my favorite piece

It's just great

Kate has a new work coming out, I am listening to it on KCRW a free preview:

http://www.kcrw.com/music/programs/ap/ap111114kate_bush_50_words_f

It is different, a new expanse for Kate. It must not have been easy, knowing her music as well as I think I do. The tonality of the chords, the harmonics of the voices, the etherial lyrics. More light and opaque than usual. Inspiring to listen to an artist who continues to push her own envelopes like that. I listen to music constantly when I work, Kate being one that I've mentioned before who takes up much speaker time in my studio. It is like a drug to me, enabling me to escape into my own depths so I can work. Undistracted, hiding from the rest of the world in my studio. 

Why does the painter paint? Why work to make new art? I wonder that as I am at it. Unable to stop if I wanted to, but not an addiction, an extension of how I came into this world and what I desire to do. Even if that desire is coded and screened from my conscious mind. I do link to my unconscious, my superconscious, seeking from where the work comes. My job is to bring it out. Not quite sure why.

My new works are coming from this place. New works that started out as leftovers, accidents and spills. I had a few of these from over the years that I kept. One of them I put on a wall in my office and I have an understanding of now that previously was only a hint. I have always liked it, wondered about its significance. It is abstract and yet is very much a picture as the picture that it creates in the mind. Well...I don't want to over analyze now what I will be showing later. I think of what is hidden behind the screen, what the opaqueness remains, and that is what these works are. Occult.

On another note, but in the same vein, it feels like 1987, 88, 89 to me...those were years shortly after the huge New Age convergance that swept the country, and the world really. Books referenced in The Occult section took up more and more shelves in the Barnes and Nobles. Shirley MacLaine, Whitley Streiber, Ramtha...they occupied my imagination, took ahold of my fear and eventually set me free. 

More on that in a later post, but for now it works with the new works I am working on and is part of the inspiration for why now is the right time for these new paintings. 

Study for Occult

Watercolor on Paper

5" x 7"

2005-

Three Loud Knocks...

above my side of the bed on the wall behind the head board struck at 4:30 AM, Thursday, early morning. 11/3/11.
I sat there in bed wondering, what the hell was that? It was unmistakable, even in my sleep state what I heard. Normally I would tune in and ask "what is that?" However, this was so precise and specific that my shock took over and I kind of retreated, not wanting to know or even connect that this was perhaps "real." I laid there for another hour before I fell back asleep. That evening going to bed I asked Peter if he heard the knocks, and he confirmed that he had indeed, but tried to ignore it also. "We watched too much American Horror Story," he said. Many times during that day I thought of my dear friend Byron, who lives in New York. Byron, who I have mentioned here before as he lives across the street from Patti Smith. I heard Byron talking in my head. "High-Society voices," he said. I laughed to myself. Little funny things he has said to me over the years, funny things just between us. Things I had not shared with anyone else and I thought to myself, "funny how this particular thing between us on one else knows about...and as funny as it is I have no one else to share it with."
I learned the next day, Friday, that my dear beloved friend Byron had passed the day before. No one seems to be sure when he died, although I have a pretty good idea.
My beloved friend Liza told me she was just reading about the number 3 in spiritual terms, connecting to the perfection of Birth, Life, Death. She felt that the three loud knocks resonated with this, and Byron passing.
When someone close to us passes through, they leave the door open and through them we can connect to the multidimentionality of All That Is, of who we are. I have experienced this many times in the last two days. Connecting with Byron, even when I am at work and trying to focus on the job Byron will pop through and I will be transported to another place and time. Suddenly backstage at the Winter Garden Theatre and Bryon is passing me in the dark carrying a wig. In the smoke lounge laughing as he flicks another cigarette out the window. "Did I tell you about the time I flicked a cigarette into the open window of a taxi driver and it accidentally landed right in his crotch?" Laughing until tears formed in the edges of my eyes.
"Tout a lour." I find myself saying to the performer I just apparently had a quick change with during the show Bring It On, which I am currently working on. "Tout a lour" was what Byron always said to me and what I said back to him whenever he left. I bounced out with Byron without thinking of it. Of course I am fairly susceptible to wandering, although Byron is helping. I think about Byron downloading his Life as he passes and wonder how that affects those of us who shared it with him. Does it cull from us those memories, those attachments, those shared experiences and work them through so he can pass easily? Do they hold him down, slow him down, keep him near for a bit longer because the pain of the belief of separation is too much to bear? I hope Byron flows easily into All That Is. I hope he is detached from these earthly experiences, and enjoys the expanse of the infinite that he is. I know these aspects of him that are so funny, so courageous, so connected to the beautiful mystery of Life, and so giving to those he encountered and worked with and shared with but I know that he is infinitely much more than this. He is complete. He is 3 and has experienced Birth, Life, Death, and upon leaving (or maybe it was upon arriving?) gave three loud knocks.
Thanks Byron.