December 17,2019

Images
Body

 
1. Up late the usual early morning trip darkest nights of winter. 2.  Cold went for walk to bank to check balance in checking account and get some cash, cold but above freezing conditions not great was very careful with my walker. 3. Got email from Chris Karcher a friend of mine who lives in San Antonio Texas he and his daughter Lauren coming up here in January it will be delightful to see them both. 4. Tried to delete my Facebook with no success horrible tangle of tech nonsense around and around decided to leave it up and use it less until I have some fresh content. 5.My neuropathy is worse in cold weather Dr.K said the cold makes it trigger taking Gabapenton again not noticing much difference yet , I think it has some side effects that are rather subtle . 6. My feet are not good even with new shoes and a recent toe nail cut they are still very painful when I walk too much. I soaked them last night but they were very sore, I think the toe nail cutting is a waste of time and money but I can’t get after them very well myself, one home care worker was very good but it was very temporary after a hospitalization. The medication I use to sooth the pain is helpful but temporary . If I don’t walk I feel very unwell for me walking is thinking like Rousseau to walk is to think. 7. Daryl came by yesterday and fixed the bathroom light fixture it was out for a few days. He is very handy and now it is functional again which is a blessing of the first order. I have spent a lot of time in the room it is warm and intimate and it seems like my only refuge at times, 8. Working on a very peculiar painting collage arguing with it as much as working on it. Standing to work on it  causes a lot of fatigue and soreness but it refreshes my sense of personal value too. It is made to be seen both by natural and black light. 9. I have been looking at my notebooks under black light recently and it has been very interesting and inspiring. They seem to make an odd sort of sense illuminated by black light, it spreads through pages stains the next pages penetrates through several pages at times leaving fluorescent ghost images. I have been using fluorescent paints since the mid 1960’s and since the 1980’s even more they stay quite fluorescent in the notebooks and even in paintings they hold up well enough. I had wanted to do a fluorescent installation at Walker Art Center but wasn’t practical I used 3-D glasses which helped viewers understand that the art works also had a different dimension optically. Some day an installation which will feature black light will be made. 10. The notebooks are especially rich with the black light. I love the glow, it reminds me a lot of my fascination with interactive color vibrations. Only utilizing the fluorescence seems to pump up the glowing strangeness and makes the notebook pages even more compelling. It is difficult to photograph even on a pc screen. but in real time the effect can be spellbinding. 10. 4:09 AM daylight savings time central zone I tell you this because this is the time I have been writing and posting since my fall and cancer treatments. My sleep is not good comes in short measures. The kidney disease and renal cancer seem to wake me over and over at night to piss in a bottle or get up and check posts from friends in Europe and other time zones. 11. I am not very gifted on the pc but I am always learning. I do think the jpegs are very likely to be all that remains of things now in the distant future.sensing my own demise and the planet’s decline it does seem as if the object as we have known it is vanishing. Looking at the ruins of previous civilizations I begin to understand that our art is always coming to pieces, ephemeral materials that I prefer especially paper and fabric will only persist for so long but digital pictures and texts will survive. 12. I consider much of my art work in terms of digital existence indeed I think I have become increasing conscious of my art as a digital form. Though it is also in a material form that form is already deteriorating in my lifetime cracks in oil paintings yellowing in pvc vinyl and other works involving fugitive pigments Was  and experimental techniques that yield less permanent art works. Also things get lost destroyed damaged etc. What remains is still a huge amount but it is compromised by the decomposition native to organic materials like paper and canvas etc. 13. I do believe their is a mystical dimension to art working. Maybe more so because of my organic brain disorder , being bi-polar has given me some insights and perceptions that are not there so -to-speak for people with more normative brain and psychological function. As well my intellectual investigations have brought me to a sense that my art is very much like my dreams, and delusional states of consciousness. This fascination with the bi-polar has led me to believe that my art working is binary too both in perceptual states and in terms of it’s peculiar contents personal and otherwise. 14. This mystical dimension is more readily apparent using devices like 3-D and black light but it is also apparent because my art work compels thought and desire. My philosophical outlook my desire to find a means to go deeper into the human quagmire of psychological perceptual cues, has led me to think I am on to something. A sort of path into a dream state or a way to picture the delusion of existence temporal impermanent  being. Art may just be the central activity of human life the thinking we call creative may be why we wonder and why we get lost in our life. 15. This activity this wondering searching may also be by thinking is so much what we do as much as we breath! 16. I know more than I can say in words that is why I have lived in a forest of images and words.

17. The number of this Tuesday this day in 2019 . We get lost in art working much the same as we get lost in a text or a book or a puzzle. I have worked all my life on art and I feel as if I only now and then hit the mark while other times I am quite certain that I have made a body of work that is useful and worth examination. This fickleness is native to my bi-polar nature and to my impending departure from this existence. I do not have the answer but I do have a vision. 18. My interest in the Kabbalah has been very enduring. Indeed even my readings in Wittgenstein and Nietzsche have been enduring and always deepening. The nature of our temporary visit to this world seems to me the very nature of the project. We speak we sing we dance we picture and we perish. The remains of our work are broken by the very nature of time. It ‘‘tis a broken vessel this life it only makes sense at times and backwards at that. 19. Perception is enhanced by thought. 20. My birthday my number. In December of 1944 by C -section in the afternoon. On a day when the dark is pervasive the longest nights of the year. Indeed born into the darkest time when the Nazis are in the last battles, the camps are yet to be liberated. A very dark moment, a very nasty place Chicago a gangster paradise. 21. My life was always pictures and words and colors and dreams and movies. I sang and I danced and I dreamed of pictures and words blended into some thing mysterious like the truth the naked mystery of being alive. 22. I still pray even if I am just talking to myself. I ask for forgiveness I ask for peace I ask for understanding and most of all I ask for love.

 

 

 

 

Obama Pony in bathroom for several years .