little ashes

"Les Elephants"
-Salvador Dali















Javier Beltran and
Robert Pattinson as
Federico Garcia Lorca
and Salvador Dali

le deluge

I've been kicking up a lot of dust lately. Digging around. Delving deep. Wading back into the water. Sinking my hands in and searching. Feeling with blind fingertips. Tumbling my dark earth around, trying to shake out some of that sacred stuff. That rich, Garden of Eden dirt. The real deal. The dirt of history. The dirt of people and places. The dirt of war and disease. The dirt of love and time and healed wounds. My dirt. My dust. My ash. My people, and places. My wars. My plagues. My hope and heart, my scars, and re-set bones.

It is in this search... this journey, that I have discovered something. What I think to be some country of old, is perhaps, a Spain from another life. Or France through the eyes of someone a million miles away and decades in the past. Either road i see will lead me to the same place so I step forward. I take it in. I explore. Each scent massages it's way into the dark alleys of my mind. Each eyeful cascades over and blankets me in the feathery down of curious familiarity. Each sound, a siren calling me. Compelling my feet to move. My surroundings show themselves to be brilliantly new, and are yet, somehow, reassuringly ancient in both personage and spirit.

It is filtered through this faded photograph wall of my mind, that I begin to see something more. Something seeping in at the cracks. A light, a breath, a knowing. The filmstrip peels back and burns away. And I seem to have struck gold. Or at the very least, something heavy as gold, something solid. Something that shines as I brush away the mental debris cobwebbing it's way across the surface. The ground around me darkens. Grows soft. Shadows itself across the landscape. A humming in my feet. The rhythm beat of our drum. A pulse. A surge of tide almost overtakes me and yet in it's ebb I feel stronger. I am strong. But something is different. This is strength in a new mask. Strength of the poet, the artist, the musician. Strength of life and of death. The strength of sorrow and of joy. The strength of yesterday, today and tomorrow. The strength of love. Strings of the guitar and the blood of violins. It is a wildness, fierce with beauty. A halo in the depths, it rises with the moon and stirs itself among the stars. A fight to the death, and what's killed brings about a wash of clarity, purpose, determination of will. A haunted yearning, real and purposeful, rises up, begins to sway this soul to and fro. Back and forth. Ebb and flow. It grows and grows, howling it's way through the mountains and rivers and caves and canyons of my being. It begins to well up, threatens to burst through these caged eyes. I cannot contain it. I will not. It is the Duende, and it has fastened a jewel into my crown. A third sight that craves to tell the story of beauty and nature and the heart of all things. Mysteries upon mysteries... and a luxuriously lengthy stretch of road written in my name and set before me.

The Forgetting Room

One of the first to inspire me in my pursuit of the arts and an art-filled life was Nick Bantock. Accomplished author of "The Griffin and Sabine Trilogies," "The Venetian's Wife," and "The Forgetting Room," among others, Nick Bantock also illustrates his own works. As an artist, he works with mixed-media, focusing on collage, assemblage, found-object art, photomontage and more. Putting things together in ways opposite to the typical, mixing not only materials, but ideas and styles, his works draw you in. Into the chaos. And the order. And that realm where the two coincide, each dependent upon the other for their very existence.

I have always had a strong appreciation for the things we human beings create. Art. Music. Literature. Theatre. Film. Dance. Architecture. Things born from that ancient and universal need for expression. For communication, for understanding. That hand reaching out for another. That person that sees it, feels it, lives it the way you do. And this partnership of shared experiences and the need to connect, is yet another product birthed from that secret place, somewhere deep. The 'duende' perhaps, that all artists must wrestle with. My sapling interest in the idea of mixed-media art years ago, has grown today, into a full-fledged desire to produce works that bridge any and every type of artistic human creation together. A mix-tape/painting/sculpture/book with working lights and functionality. While I have had more progress in the way of let's say "pre-production and planning," I do have a few finished pieces that will be up for viewing and critique as soon as I can harness the reigns of this devil box. In the mean time, enjoy these works by Nick Bantock from, and inspired by, "The Forgetting Room."