"Exile Study No.4 ~ Perdita" ink and graphite on paper, 22"x 30", Walt Pascoe 2012

"Exile Study No.3 ~ House of Broken Dreams" ink and graphite on paper, 22"x30", Walt Pascoe 2012

"Exile Study No. 2 ~ Prospero's Magic" ink and graphite on paper, 22"x30", Walt Pascoe 2012

"...Following a vocation or an art form through decades of practice and understanding will break the idealistic heart that began the journey and replace it, if we sidestep the temptations of bitterness and self-pity, with something more malleable, compassionate and generous than the metaphysical organ with which we began the journey. We learn, grow and become compassionate and generous as much through exile as homecoming; as much through loss as gain, as much through giving things away as in receiving what we believe to be our due."

~ David Whyte , from a typically insightful and articulate essay you can read in its entirety here: "The Poetic Narrative of Our Times" 

Along w/ this brilliant poem:

MAMEEN

Be infinitesimal under that sky, a creature 
even the sailing hawk misses, a wraith 
among the rocks where the mist parts slowly.
Recall the way mere mortals are overwhelmed
by circumstance, how great reputations
dissolve with infirmity and how you, 
in particular, live a hairsbreadth from losing 
everyone you hold dear.

Then, look back down the path as if seeing 
your past and then south over the hazy blue 
coast as if present to a wide future, 
recall the way you are all possibilities 
you can see and how you live best 
as an appreciator of horizons 
whether you reach them or not, 
admit that once you have got up 
from your chair and opened the door, 
once you have walked out into the clean air
toward that edge and taken the path up high
beyond the ordinary you have become 
the privileged and the pilgrim
the one who will tell the story
and the one, coming back 
from the mountain, 
who helped to make it.

- David Whyte
from RIVER FLOW: New & Selected Poems 1984-2007
©2006 Many Rivers Press

 

 

Walt Pascoe, oil on canvas, 45" x 73", 2005

"And for just a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, with a phantom dogging its own heels, and myself hurrying to a plank where all the angels dove off and flew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness, the potent and inconceivable radiancies shining in bright Mind Essence, innumerable lotuslands falling open in the magic mothswarm of heaven. I could hear an indescribable seething roar which wasn't in my ear but everywhere and had nothing to do with sounds. I realized that I had died and been reborn numberless times but just didn't remember especially because the transitions from life to death and back to life are so ghostly easy, a magical action for naught, like falling asleep and waking up again a million times, the utter casualness and deep ignorance of it. I realized it was only because of the stability of the intrinsic Mind that these ripples of birth and death took place, like the action of the wind on a sheet of pure, serene, mirror-like water. I felt sweet, swinging bliss, like a big shot of heroin in the mainline vein; like a gulp of wine late in the afternoon and it makes you shudder; my feet tingled. I thought I was going to die the very next moment. But I didn't die...” 

― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

"Exile Study No.1, Jungle Fever" ink and graphite on paper, 22" x 30", Walt Pascoe  2012

 

Recently re-read a favorite. It's the transcript, edited by Renee McKee, of a talk Philip Guston gave at the University of Minnesota in March 1978. It's an exceptionally lucid and honest discussion of his artistic practice. And in one particularly telling passage he quotes himself, in a letter to a friend, the poet and novelist Ross Feld :

"I have recently done a painting which continues to baffle me, a highly desired state. I admit vacillating between trying to explain, or not to. Here are some thoughts then on a matter which should perhaps not be talked about at all. I also think the only real things to talk about are not possible to talk about. The painting might well say, 'What do you want from me? I'm only a painting. Let me be'. But I can't prevent my old habits of analysis and speculation. To be specific, as I recall with this painting, changes occur very fast, groups of forms are painted rapidly and then as quickly painted out. I felt as if I were living out the painting rather than painting it. Time was speeded up or else stopped. Quite suddenly, the work was done. Nothing felt arbitrarily placed in space, but rather irreversible; the only way, at this moment, the painting could be. The forms, which touch and bump and overlap each other, strain to separate themselves, yet cannot exist without one another. While they strive to become independent, a condition of delirium persists, as if these forms desire to configure other combinations of themselves. What a restless and startling state for forms to be in! It's like life. So in a painting, sky, ground and solid forms resist being taken apart. Yet, clearly on the plane of the painting, a singular combination of forms is fixed, held, to be contemplated."

The entire piece can be found online here: "Philip Guston Talking" 

 

I had the good fortune of seeing a powerful and comprehensive retrospective of his work at The Whitney Museum in 1981. I was moving art for a living in New York City at the time, and also had the opportunity to actually handle a bunch of his large canvases. It was just one of those seemingly random, personal moments... communing w/ the works of a painter who I admire so deeply, there in the back of my truck on a sunny fall day in Manhattan. I still have a tattered and well-read copy of the exhibition catalogue, filled w/ newspaper clippings about the show, which has managed to stay w/ me through all manner of life transitions and dislocations. 

Ross Feld went on to write a wonderful book called "Guston In Time: Remembering Philip Guston" which I've read and can highly recommend, along w/ a very compelling memoir written by Guston's daughter, Musa Mayer titled "Night Studio: A Memoir of Philip Guston" .

 If your're looking for a beautiful Thames & Hudson book w/ fabulous illustrations there is "Philip Guston Retrospective"  , which also contains excellent essays by Dore Ashton/Michael Auping/Bill Berkson/Andrew Graham-Dickson/Philip Guston/Joseph Rishel/Michael E. Shapiro

 

 

While in Toronto recently I had the pleasure of visiting the AGO. The Frank Gehry addition is breathtaking, and works exceptionally well as both art-space and architecture. 

I was particularly taken with the installed wood sculpture of Guiseppe Penone in the portion of the addition devoted to the Galleria Italia.

You can view the entire flickr set of photos here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/waltpascoe/

And more on Guiseppe Penone's work here: http://www.mariangoodman.com/artists/giuseppe-penone/

...when something beautiful catches your eye. Often when you least expect it. In a place you hadn't thought to look. It can feel as though something or someone literally commandeered your senses for a second and re-directed your attention. It can feel like a gift. The gift a moment of utter wakefulness. A reminder not to go through life half asleep, forever charging forward, into some illusion called the next, where some hypothetical better thing awaits you. As if there was actually anything other than NOW.

Stories come to us like new senses

And as he keeps washing

 

Here it is once again this one note

from a string of longing

 

tightened suddenly from both ends

and held for plucking

 

tone torn out of one birdsong

though that bird

 

by now may be

where a call cannot

 

follow it

the same note goes on calling

 

across space and is heard now

in the old night and known there

 

a silence recognized

by the silence it calls to

 

Digital Photograph "Dance With Desire" Walt Pascoe 2009

"The Wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle. The moon does the same, and both are round...Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood and so it is in everything where power moves..."