Oil on Canvas

Interviewer: When do you paint?

Artist: At Night

Interviewer: When do you sleep?

Artist: I don’t. I can’t sleep. Too much work to do. These canvases won’t paint themselves, you know?

Painting 1

The cold choir of the endless white waves ignores the monster on its side. The sand wrestles with the saltwater to become a brown sludge that holds him on the shoreline. She has made him. He is painted into the middle of the canvas with only one witness other than we who watch him living or dying or breathing or not. The particles of his beard stretch longer than the sunset above the whale.

Painting 2

The mouth of the sky caresses the thin crust of the earth. We are productive. We point. We gather. We crouch. The cold air rustles through the long grass, and the black patches of paint creep through the skin of the planet. Are they anxious? Are they worried? Should we be worried? Is she worried that she makes this thing? This work of art? This endless plane? This flatness? This exhausting search for danger?

Painting 3

There is stillness in the underground, and the beast has not yet traveled. We are safe to cross over. We are hidden in our protective skin. We are here for every reason and no reason. The texture of the air is stale but it is cool and it is wet. It’s an old wetness. It is wetness that has been trapped down here for as long as people needed to travel. And these tracks take us everywhere and nowhere. And she will not bring the train. They will ignore fear because the train is not coming. Not in this painting. Not today.

Painting 4

Human beings have been here. You can see the remnants. You can see the things they have left behind. The basket is old. You know that the space is old. The people who live here are even older. Through the window is the lie of light. It’s the fog of disembodiment. It is the gray inner coat of vital organs. We are trapped inside trying to stay alive. Sooner or later we will be here to do the work. The ancient work. The work that she has left for us. We will find the work in the browns and the tans and in the bruised blues of the tools that she has left for us. We will do the work. We will do the work. We will do the work, again.

Painting 5

There is the side and the other side. The other side is multiplied. And there are not more than three. And between us is the frozen river. The frozen, unfrozen river… because it is not cold enough or still enough to bring us together. And yet being apart is exactly what we want. She has put us on each side. There is danger. There is the chance that someone might be hurt. There is the chance that someone might hurt someone else. Because we are already hurt. We are already feeling the pain of the gray blue that falls on us. There is no snow but the sky is still falling. You can see it behind us. You can see it around us. This is the saddest state. The saddest country. In the middle of the horrible season. We ignore the sadness. We group tightly to the weapons of our own gray surrender.

Painting 6

She breaks the winter with a sky that could make anyone smile, and yet here we are in the corruptible dead shell of our bodies. A body that once housed the bodies of the happy, but now it is a body that is diseased. It is a body that has been touched by all of the danger of nature. She is angry. She is frightened. She holds her fear up to her eye. As lovely as she looks in her dress, she is not aware of her loveliness. Because this is the endless plane. This is the country that is so flat and so cold even in the spring. Even under the teardrop blue sky. This is the country where violence can easily happen.

Painting 7

Once we could escape. Once people did. Once they traveled from one end of the earth to the other. And then back. Back and back and back and forth. Until travel was no longer possible. Until escape was just someone's memory. Someone who no longer exists. Now we stare at the hulk. We stare at the Leviathan. We stare at the monster like a dead whale on the edge of the ocean. We see its black tarnished blood streaming from underneath it like a shadow or gunpowder. Because this is also a weapon. This is something that could have killed. It might have killed. It still could kill. We sit on the edge of winter and we cry and we howl and we mew.

Painting 8

Nature has made it inconvenient, but we have found a way to collide the golden glowing palace of accessibility. She makes us this way. She wakes up and sees us from a dream that she had that might have made her happy. Yet, as she stares into her mind, the dream becomes this wintry truth. While her children are off at school, her mind is left to explore the sorrow of her home. The collective sorrow of the people who live here in her home. She feels it. She can feel it in the colors that she uses to create this oasis. They are parked. They are stalking. They are shopping for the things that they think they need. When the things that they truly need are lost and embedded in their frozen and broken dreams.

Painting 9

Ill crops protrude from the Earth, and then my mind is bent on nothing but harvesting. The night looms over me, but I am lost. She raps me in sunshine, but the lights are on in the rooms that are dark and the people who are not in those rooms are blind. I might be half hidden. I might be unseen. But the inevitable tempest of nature's trouble has seen me so long ago. If this is a place to hide, then I will hide. I will burrow. I will plant myself into this cold earth until one day I might shoot through the rough brown skin and be a stalk of light. To live tethered to the ground but still to be free in the breeze of spring that always promises to come. Spring that might go missing for me.

Painting 10

She leans on violence and sunshine and the dusty memories of what once was a beautiful spring. The green grass is dead and its starchy carcass lounges all about like the dead on a battlefield. She's not interested in burying or cleaning or clearing. Her anger is a steel stick or a red hot waste of time. Work hangs around her like prison guards on the way to the death chamber. She can't escape it. It can't escape her. Somewhere someone is unaware that she is angry. She is tired. And she is worn out. The brown veins of the tree's shadow leaks out the bottom of the frame. The paint brushes have brushed it all together like a dirty neat pile on the floor of a barber shop just before the broom will take it all away.

Painting 11

Light like an itch spreads over the tummy of the tough rock that has seen different days on this Earth. Now, i exists as ruins in the middle of a diseased forest. He stares at the light like he is staring at the future. He doesn't know that he doesn't have a future that's any different than this little beam of light. He thinks there are treasures and maps and wild creatures that live outside of him, but what he will discover in time is that all of these things only exist inside of him. His dreams will be diseases one day and the people who wonder where he is now will one day be dead. And he will be the one in the house wondering where the little boy has gone off to. He will be the old one in the house wondering what is the little boy's middle name. Because he will have forgotten. Even if he can remember why the moss grows on one side of the rock and not on the other, he will forget all the children that eventually will come from him.

Painting 12

She has stepped outside of the hospital corners of the bed and that imagination runs cold on her thin white legs. And she walks through this scene, creating the impossible. She pushes those well tucked sheets away with her feet before she wields her brushes to make illusions out of reality. We are holding on to the corners of our shirts and the edges of our shorts and to the spots on our forehead that used to be thicker and fuller and covered with hair. The years that have passed and left us this way seem to lose all of their burden and all of their weights. The one lifts weightlessly through the blue summer sky. She wants us to enter. She wants us to see how common it is. How normal. How these wrinkled and worn people are simply living their lives inside of her head that has escaped from the safety and security of sanity. She has escaped from the hospital of the norm.

Painting 13

We come to this cabin as creatures or intruders. We are in a mist and a chill and a “all too familiar” darkness. Somewhere someone might be watching us. Or they might be simply living and breathing and eating or dying. It's possible to know, but we know that somewhere along the line they rejected the darkness. They might reject us. As we creep up through this misery anonymously, we might be the unwanted ones lurking about outside. And yet the door is closed. And the tower is dark. And the evergreens are ever green while their brothers and sisters are as naked as we feel. Because even fully dressed, we feel uncovered. We feel unsafe. While the warm yellow light that she paints makes me want to feel at home, I am not at home. I am nowhere. I cannot turn around to see where I've been. And it's not clear where I need to go. But I'd like to be inside that cabin even if it came with danger. Even if it comes with death. I'd like to see it just as everyone would like to. Because what's in that cabin is inevitable but it's warm and intoxicating.

Painting 14

And now she disarms us as if we are suspected criminals standing meekly on the other side of the street. And she paints the banal and the beautiful and the broken. She paints them in the middle of movement and in the middle of thought. She paints them unaware. She paints them with worry. And she paints them blissfully lost in the tepid thoughts of the everyday. Of the minutes between the things you do that matter. Those lost minutes that can wrap you up and make you cross your legs and let you sit and stare at nothing. But then again who is staring at nothing? Because she is across the street with her easel. She is there with all her paint. She is there working away the anxiety that chases her like a cloud across a blue gray sky. The worry that runs like a tricycle down the middle of a dirt street. Down the middle of the poverty of a dusty dirt road.

Painting 15

What is it to be naked? What is it to be undressed? If it's the clothes that we only wear when we are alone? Is it to wear no clothes at all when we are alone with only those who are naked against us? Reality hangs above us like a sheet that we should have washed a month ago. The blinding light of morning would attack us if it weren't for the shade of that linen sheet. But we are caught up in the embryo sleep that tries so hard to delete the many traumas that have batted us this way and that way as we navigate the minutes again. The minutes that live endlessly between the things that happen. This sleep and these dreams get less and less effective as we get closer and closer to the end of things. Because maybe the truth of it all is: the traumas accumulate and fill in all the gaps until eventually there are no minutes and there is nothing but the end of time. Whether or not the sheet can stay so peacefully and so protectively in the air above us won't matter because the dreams will end and the colors will end and the eyes that look upon us will be all that's left of us forever.

Painting 16

[Incomplete]

Painting 17

[Incomplete]

Interviewer: You seem to live inside of these.

Artist: That’s true.

Interviewer: How will you escape?

Artist: I won’t. Like the whale, I will die on the wet sand. I painted it this way. I know nothing else.