Richard Whittaker

It seems to me, that experience is not honored in our culture. We're free to indulge in experience, but it's not honored as a potential source of real knowledge. The question is where do the ideas and the experiences intersect, right?

Interviewer: Yes.

I think they intersect in the realm of experience. That's where I live. That's where we all live—in the realm of experience. But somehow we have the idea that we live in the realm of matter, of things. We're convinced that it's a world full of things. But, really, the only way things come to us is through the experience of them. But the problem with the realm of experience is that it's not a quantifiable realm. It's not subject to academic, scientific, technological access. So therefore, in a way, it's a realm that has fallen into dishonor, or just disregard.

For instance in psychology thirty or forty years ago, there was still this idea of the unconscious, and what was required was a psychotherapist who was an artist of sorts, who could somehow interact in a way so that the unconscious, which used to be regarded as a reality, so that something was allowed, or made possible to take place there that would be healing. But nowadays we live in a different world. We've got neurochemistry and pharmeceuticals. We've got expert chemists, expert druggists. We have psychiatrists who give pills out to everybody.

So that is just one example where the realm of experience has lost its footing as a source of meaningful mystery, a kind of grandeur, a potential place of great secrets and discoveries and of great reality. I'd say that art, at its best, is operating somewhere in that realm. I call it the realm of experience, but even more specifically, in a way, it's the realm of a quality of feeling, I'd say.

Feeling. We don't know how to talk about feeling much. Music causes people to have feeling, and so everyone is feeding themselves with iPods. But isn't that really kind of a poor substitute?

-Richard Whittaker, from Interview with Richard Whittaker

Interview: Stephen De Staebler

Works & Conversations
Interview: Stephen De Staebler by Richard Whittaker
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You have to burn through a lot of pretty work in order to love the gift of the clay-its randomness, its tendency to crack and warp. All the things that the perfectionists think are negative qualities are actually positive if you approach it from a different aesthetic.
-Stephen De Staebler

Somehow I'd gotten it into my mind that if you really wanted to become a serious artist, you went to Europe to get your grounding. So when I'm in this stupid state of mind, who do I meet but my true mentor? He was right there, virtually across the hall!
-Stephen De Staebler

The body is our sculpture. We live in our body like it is an animate sculpture. The fact that most art in civilization has been figurative is not by accident. When you're more aware of your body, you're more on the edge of survival. Look at Lascaux.
-Stephen De Staebler

Any person with consciousness has to know we are here between being born and dying. We were born out of eternity and we return to a state of eternity.
-Stephen De Staebler

When I say casually to people that I learned more about art playing basketball than taking art courses nobody ever understood what I meant. I never was really able to articulate it well. The thing about shooting a basket is that you have to sort of transcend your mind. It's all visual and spatial. So if you're going to groove as a player, you have to get into a space and a rhythm and endurance that is the same sort of thing it takes making big clay sculptures. It's similar for me, anyway. There's an excitement in moving in space. That's why I think I developed ways of jumping on clay, stacking them until they wanted to fall down.
-Stephen De Staebler

For my senior thesis - and you had to have one to graduate - I did mine on St. Francis of Assisi. He's a fascinating character, much more interesting than the gentle monk who is feeding the birds. He said tanto sa, tanto fa (you know as much as you do). Doing was more important than theology.
-Stephen De Staebler

I think what gave me peace of mind was the realization that you can exist on two planes, the plane of accomplishment and the plane of the spirit-where you need nothing but being to affirm being alive.
-Stephen De Staebler

Stephen De Staebler

Regarding a process of spontaneous archeology De Staebler has said that you take fragments that speak to one another and bring them into some kind of field that is more than the sum of its parts.
-Stephen De Staebler, The New York Times

We are all wounded survivors, alive but devastated selves, fragmented, isolated — the condition of modern man. Art tries to restructure reality so that we can live with the suffering.
-Stephen De Staebler

The human figure is the most loaded of all forms because we live in one. The figure obsesses not just artists, but human beings. It’s our prison. It’s what gives us life and gives us death.
-Stephen De Staebler

Howard Ikemoto

When my daughter about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college — that my job was to teach people how to draw. She stared back at me, incredulous, and said, You mean they forgot?

-Howard Ikemoto, from Art and Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland

Gregg Mazel

I too stare at the edge of the precipice when I begin writing music. Looking down, I encounter the ground and the sea. Looking up, I discover the sky. Looking in, I encourage myself to see.

-Gregg Mazel

Painting

The imagery for my paintings and drawings does not come to me fully formed. I poke around terrified on the edge of the abyss and leap in scribbling and wiping it away. I am terrified because I am an astronaut without the protection of a rocket ship. The terror comes from the vulnerability I feel when being out there receiving the signals. When I am not feeling this sort of vulnerability I am usually not in a painting phase. I require this particular sort of receptivity to make paintings which is also a painful state. Perhaps this is why it's called pain-ting. So I am painting when I am most frightened of it. Does this make sense? I am always hoping to accumulate some courage along the way or lessen the fear but maybe I'm just not designed this way. I must accept my way of being; fear in one hand and trembling courage in the other.

It is all very hard for me to accept myself I guess it is my life's challenge. I have two to three month spells of terror 'receive mode' which is when I paint. Then my energy shifts to sensory and physically hyperactive 'transmit mode' and I must bake and cook and write letters and vignettes and I feel overflowing energy with accompanying joie de vivre, confidence and optimism. I keep thinking I'd probably get somewhere in life if I was just one way. Bill says that's a myth I carry and anyway it's not an option. It's not how I was made. I know he is right but I am having a very hard time letting go of my notions. My pal Susan would say What is it about this notion that am holding onto and invested in? Perhaps I am still preserving my mother's voice that said I am all wrong with bad wiring.

My painter pal Ken Maryanski said years ago Change your beliefs. I have been told all my life that my internal energies are what enable me to paint. I think of the quote by Stephen DeStaebler Artists don't get down to work until the pain of working is exceeded by the pain of not working. I am trying to convince myself and accept that this switching from internal to external is a gift and not an impediment to making work. But don't REAL artists face one muse every day? Not necessarily and many of my painter friends don't either. Maybe what I have to accept is I have two different muses one in my sensory body (love of words) and one in my haunted head (mind full of colors). I can barely use words when the paint happens and I can't paint when the words replace colors. I accept day and night and the four seasons, why can't I accept this?

In Early September when I went from sensory high energy this summer to dropping down into internal September mode I had a vivid scary dream. It was a predawn rollover dream.

I dreamed I was crouched on top of a friends refrigerator while I harpooned a big bear that was pursuing me. I apologized before skewering him a bunch of times. Then he was dead but as dream logic goes he was suddenly alive again and I finished him off with BBQ tools. Then I went around bragging that I killed a big brown bear with BBQ tools forgetting that the real work was with the harpoon.

I have been thinking about this dream for weeks. At first I just thought it was just a crazy rollover dream then I started thinking of the bear as a metaphor for my painting and how when my energy shifts I make light of the terror and the fight. I brag that I killed the bear with BBQ tools forgetting the real work is with the harpoon. Also in the dream the bear could be a stand in for my mother. She has been a big scary bear in my dreams before (and in my life) and perhaps I am still apologizing for having to kill her off to get on with my artistic life, and accept myself as I am. Another interpretation I had was I have a lot of tools and I must use them all. Another friend said that to him the dream means make do with less. I liked that too.

Kahlil Gibran

Joy and Sorrow

Then a woman said, 'Speak to us of Joy and Sorrow.'

And he answered: Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.

And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.

And how else can it be?

The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.

Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven?

And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?

When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.
When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

Some of you say, “Joy is greater than sorrow,” and others say, “Nay, Sorrow is the greater.” But I say unto you, they are inseparable.

Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.

Verily you are suspended like scales between your sorrow and your joy. Only when you are empty are you at a standstill and balanced. When the treasure-keeper lifts you to weigh his gold and his silver, your joy or your sorrow must necessarily rise or fall.

-Kahlil Gibran, from The Prophet

New Painting

I have posted a new painting called The Farce. Have a peek!

Another New Painting

I have posted another Carnival painting called Snake Charmer. Have a peek!

Rick Bursky Interview

Fabulous interview of poet Rick Bursky.
Click here.

New Painting

I have posted a new painting called Carnival Tiger. Have a peek!

Charles Simic

Even my dog as we walk in the woods gives me the impression that he is familiar with the writings of Henry David Thoreau and is curious to know how I feel about certain of his ideas.
-Charles Simic, Paris Review

Charles Simic

A Cornell box is like a poem, a place where unlikely things come together to give the viewer a new aesthetic experience. Beauty for Cornell is something one finds. I never met him, but knew people who did, and he’d say things like, On the Twenty-eighth Street IRT station, there’s a great gum machine with a broken mirror that’s really beautiful. That way of seeing New York City made a lot of sense to me.
-Charles Simic, Paris Review

Charles Simic

It’s mind-boggling to discover that a word, a phrase, or an entire poem perfectly understandable in one language cannot be translated into another. Whatever the answer to this puzzle, it has something to do with the relationship of experience to language and the way each language encompasses a particular worldview. In fact, it’s not only a question for poetry to concern itself with, but for philosophy, too, to ponder.
-Charles Simic, Paris Review

Charles Simic

One of the distinct advantages of growing up in a place where one is apt to find men hung from lampposts as one walks to school is that it cuts down on grumbling about life as one grows older.
-Charles Simic, Paris Review

Charles Simic

. . . I’m like a monk in a whorehouse, gnawing on a chunk of dry bread while watching the ladies drink champagne and parade in their lacy undergarments.
-Charles Simic, Paris Review

Charles Simic

Is it true one grows nostalgic even about the horrors as one grows old? Probably. I'm nostalgic about an August afternoon after the war. My mother, brother, and I were being escorted at gunpoint and on foot from one prison to another. At some point we walked past an apple orchard, and our guard let us stop and pick apples. Not a care in the world. Munching the apples and chatting with our guard.
-Charles Simic, A Fly in the Soup

Charles Simic

Here's another early memory: a baby carriage pushed by a hump-backed old woman, her son sitting in it, both legs amputated.

She was haggling with the greengrocer when the carriage got away from her. The street was steep, so it rolled downhill with the cripple waving his crutch as if urging it on faster and faster; his mother screaming for help, and everybody else was laughing as if they were watching a funny movie . . . Keystone cops about to go over a cliff . . .

They laughed because they knew it would end well in the movies. They were surprised when it didn't in life.

-Charles Simic, A Fly in the Soup

Charles Simic

I shared the solitude of my childhood with a black cat. I sat by the window for hours on end watching the empty street, while she sat on the bed washing herself. When night fell, I stretched on the bed, and she watched the street.

On rainy days I played chess with the cat, which pretended to doze. Once when my mother turned on the table lamp, the silhouettes of the few remaining chess figures could be seen clearly on the wall grown very large. I was afraid to move. I didn't even dare to take a breath.

When I finally did, the cat had vanished, taking the chess set with it and leaving me as I was in the same mean little room with its one window and its view of the empty street.

-Charles Simic, A Fly in the Soup

Inner Dialog

I knew the day was going to be a challenge. I had a slamming headache before dawn, while dreaming my cat Sammy was lost. In the dream my studio was overtaken by two or three black and white kittens and another painter had an easel set up making it impossible for me to enter my studio door.

In real life my cat was not lost. This morning I went to clean his litter box and noticed it was empty of solid waste for the second day. As I suspected, he had taken up a squat spot behind Bill's desk. Keep your humor, I told myself as I shimmied to get between the wall and behind the desk. Somebody please make me laugh! Isn't there a number you can call? Think of all the people without power and their homes have slid off mountains into the river and middle eastern government takeovers, and wars and you are taken down by having to clean up a little bit of cat poop? Shame on you!

When I stepped outside I saw my neighbor walking with his toddler son who was pointing fascinated by his kitten who was following him. Lily and I stopped to say hello to the father and son. When we crossed the street two men were sitting on benches in the shade of the trees. Beautiful day, I said. Beautiful day the man I know shouted back in his deep voice. As I rounded the corner I saw sleeping bags draped over the railing in the baseball field bleachers. I think late at night when the park goes dark it becomes a bedroom for a few homeless guys.