rightiousness, originally uploaded by bbmarie.

Our Own Music

suffering
record players
broken guitar strings
a piece of song stuck in my head
whistling
listening
memory
an old electric guitar
kids running in circles
house concert
a new song
butter melting in the pan
carried away
love volume
unfinished

I did this drawing a few months ago and I don’t really know what it is about. I make music as a way to let my soul breath. I love live music and I am inspired by the good things I here. I am particularly interested in people who are making music that lifts me up into a place of beauty and where life begins to make sense again. I have noticed that when some beautiful piece of music is playing and Brenda and I are in an embrace the feeling of love is amplified like a knob some where on my heart has been turned up. What is this?

We need professional musicians but even more we need to be making our own music in our homes and the homes of our friends. Help us keep our homes alive with our own music not done to get paid or to make some kind of splash in the “music world” but just to make a little more space for our hearts to grow. I believe that there is a home grown music movement that is wanting to happen. Music made in our living rooms, dinning rooms and bedrooms and garages. Music made by people who do not have managers and record contracts. Music made by people who previously didn’t know they could sing. Let us let that music out.

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blue orb, originally uploaded by bbmarie.

I have been working on these pieces about depression for a certain magazine this past week. It is deep winter in Michigan these days and the garden is covered up with a thick blanket of snow and ice. I feel like some of my life is covered over with snow and ice like the back yard and it can feel sad yet I remind myself that this is the season to be frozen. It is important to know what season you are currently in so you can yield to how it wants to shape you. Sometimes I wonder if we need to find ways to connect with our sadness, sit with it, feel it and let it do its work in us. I want to be more connected with the world outside of my house where the furnace kicks on and off to regulate the heat. I want to walk around outside under the trees and feel the icy wind on my face, feel the tug of the dog on its leash and notice what the trees look like when they are naked. I want to notice l how warm her shit feels in the plastic bag as I pluck it out of the snow. I want to let my life become naked like the trees…. stark, mostly charcoal grey and ash brown. I think there are times appointed for us to feel our emptiness, our aloneness, our souls hunger. We need to become hungry and week even before we experience God’s power. We need to be the Israelites running for our lives through the parted sea and keeping it together in just a nick of time. It is that little nick of time that God seems to use to sharpen the pencil point of our lives like Frank Lloyd Wright’s pen knife. Is he sharpening your point right now?

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portrait with red tulip, originally uploaded by bbmarie.

Brenda and drove to the city of Rockford IL this past week end for the opening of a show I have been included in there at there beautiful art museum downtown. We have not owned a car now for over four years. We rented a car for the trip. Before we rented the car we called around to every one we could think of who may have been able to lone out a car for a couple days. We didn’t find a car to borrow but we tried. It reminded me of what I believe is the future for all of us. It is a future of interdependence. We grew up in suburbs were every on the block had their own lawn mower and now we live in the inner city core learning to not only share our stuff but share our lives in the process. I believe we are living in the time of the great coming together, a coming together that often begins with stumbling steps, awkward and confused. This is the declaration of interdependence!

I recently decided to register for a conference in NYC that brings together christian artists who are struggling to engage with God and the world in fresh ways. I decided even though I didn’t have the money I might be able to raise the money. I got on the phone and starting asking friends for donations to pay for my expenses so I could attend the conference. (I am about $150 short of my $750 goal.) It was humbling to be in this position of weakness and vulnerability but is was so cool to experience people’s love and generosity. I had one friend who said no and it was awkward and yet real, like the poke you get bumping into an electric fence. “Oh, there’s the end of that pasture and the beginning of the other” He decided to say “no” and I chose to say “OK”. This is freedom in the world of healthy relationships where we can begin to be honest with each other and live lives of greater depth and meaning.

The little painting shown here with this entry is one of 18 paintings in the current show at RAM which is up until April 15. There are six other artists in the show all working with portraiture. They come from all over the world. It is a beautiful show in a world class space. When we walk into the large room that was filled with my paintings Brenda said, “This is like heaven.”

Thank you to all who have purchased paintings over the years. Thank you to those who give to us through ACT every month. Thank you for prayers, dropped off groceries, and borrowed cars. As I write these words I become very aware that every successes I celebrate as a working artist I has been achieved with a lot of help from my friends. Thank you.

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why does it seem so hard?, originally uploaded by bbmarie.

It can feel so hard and impossible sometimes. Like several difficult things are happening all at once and I feel like I’m being pulled under by some kind of dark undertow. Winter stretches out way past anything I can even hope for. The leaves have long since fallen and been buried. There is a grey crust of ice over every thing lovely that was once green and tender. The money dribbles out of our accounts the same way the refrigerator seems incapable of staying full except for those little mystery containers that lurk in the back. The storm clouds gather over me and then I read this;

“Clear lots of ground for your tents!
Make your tents large. Spread out! Think big!
Use plenty of rope,
drive the tent pegs deep.
you’re going to need lots of elbow room
for your growing family.
You’re going to take over whole nations;
you’re going to resettle abandoned cities.
Don’t be afraid—-you’re not going to be embarrassed.
Don’t hold back—-you’re not going to come up short.”

This is from the book of Isaiah chapter 54. I read this and can feel the poison being sucked out of me. I read this and can feel the warmth and color return to my soul. The ugly demons that hide in the shadows of my alone times begin to step back as God light filters into the rooms of my heart.

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He/Her Collage by Rick, originally uploaded by bbmarie.

This morning was collage time. Clipping, searching, pasting, cutting.
Trying this, then that. I felt tired afterwards but a good tired.

Our new friends Kelly and Jay Allen were over this week and Kelly brought some of here beautiful paintings on paper to show us. She creates a collage and them makes a painting of it in a very meticulous way using tiny little brushes and gouache paint. Having her here showing her work and talking about it inspired me to make more collage pieces. Artists inspire each other. It is important for us to get together and show our work in an informal way, sharing ideas and struggles. Why don’t we do this more often?

Hey artists out there, come over with your work that is portable and show me what you are doing and I’ll share my secrets.

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rick’s studio pic #2, originally uploaded by bbmarie.

I try to paint every day. I find it a sort of ritual. Putting paint on the pallet, yellow ocher, burnt sienna, naples yellow, titanium white, burnt umber and ultramarine blue. These colors are all dear friends of mine. Putting out dabs of paint and mixing up areas of color for the days painting feels good. Maybe it is like a fisherman piling in his nets into the boat in a very particular way and pushing off from the shore in hopes of a good catch. I have been pushing this boat off from shore for over twenty years now and hope to continue for many more years.

There is something about the process of creating a painting that continues to intrigue me. The careful building up of layers day after day that lead to a beautiful and confusing mystery. Some times it seems the paintings come with more questions then answers. The paintings require a relationship with the viewer. You need to build looking muscles. Looking at a painting is a mystical encounter something like the way the children get to Narnia in the CS Lewis chronicles. One day there is no back to the wardrobe and their next steps go from the wooden bottom of the wardrobe to the deep fluff of new snow. The next day there is just a wardrobe and no snow, no other world to explore. Some times a painting is just canvas and paint, on another day it takes you into a whole other way of seeing the world and the shift may be at first imperceptible. Maybe you wont even now that you have been changed by the painting until much later.

Paintings are best when you live with them. Visiting a gallery or museum is not the same as waking up to a painting that hangs over your bed, to a painting that quietly relinquishes its beauty by your desk at work, sifts its other worldly combination of colors into your dinning room. I long for my paintings to find homes and at the same time it breaks my heart for them to leave and I think this is the way it is supposed to be.

Making paintings is one way to bring love and beauty to a world so often growing dry and brittle. Putting a painting in your living room is like installing a fountain in your garden. Before you know it people will be dropping by to soak in the beauty and you will find your life having to expand to let them in.

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carriage house winter dec 08, originally uploaded by bbmarie.

I am glad we are on the other side of the holidays. It feels like a relief. I always feel a lot of pressure to have a meaningful experience because of all those x-mass TV specials I grew up watching. I think the highlight for me this year was seeing how happy Rose was to get an ipod from one of our attic apartment borders. Rose has wanted an ipod for a long time and we never had the courage to spend the cash. Our friend Rusty made it happen. He has decided to move to Alaska and is lightening his load. (It doesn’t seem like the ipod would be much weight tho.)

I have been having some trouble keeping the carriage house warm enough lately. I get a fire going early in the morning and paint right next to the wood stove. I am wondering what effect it will have on the paintings when they are finished. The holidays made it harder to paint every day which made me feel a little weird. The ritual of painting, moving the piece forward a little each day is deeply satisfying. The process of creating these paintings makes me feel like I am living in the old days when getting some where far away took weeks or months because you were on foot or ridding by animal power. What effect did that slow travel have on the psyches of the traveler of that time? Did it make them more patient people of greater spiritual depth? I think it probably did.

The paintings I am working on now take a long time to fully develop and there is the constant fear of running out of money before we sell the next painting. I have to continually push aside that fear and simply continue my daily walk. This makes my life a walk of faith. The constant exercise of the faith muscles in-parts a greater potency to the finished paintings because of the heat of the personal fire they are forged in. And then it follows that the paintings eventually end up in a persons home or work environment silently emitting a radiant power that stimulates that place effecting all who come and go like a sort of spiritual radiation to heal and empower.

Come and feel the heat.

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