The Slipstream

Yeticave visit: I just let go of something I was really attached to for a few years. I guess I had to do it that way for various reasons. I used painting as a way of making a visual record of my process, a process I invoked on purpose in the 90's, the process of intentionally undoing myself so I could put myself back together in a more effective and harmonious arrangement. I never really wanted to be a painter, but I fooled myself into believing I did because I had to prove to myself that I didn't want to do it that way. Musician just happens in me, as naturally as breathing. I picked up painting trying to ape the act of other people. I'd really rather be an urban kung fu farmer, but I was still too addicted to the death culture myself to realize it back when I decided to feed and water a painter identity.

Well one of my voluntary siblings stopped by tonight. It was a Yeticave visit and not just an old friend hanging out cause I did things differently. When she arrived she told me where she'd just come from in a shamanic workshop and it sounded like she would be better served by letting her do some art, make a viscerally felt record of her process then and there rather than continue chatting. So I asked if she wanted to draw in my sketchbook while listening to Bardo. So now my sketchbook has a bit of someone else's art in it, but I used my music to tune it to me so my defenses wouldn't reject it.

After as we talked her penetrating vision told me about how my room is constructed and who I was when I made the stuff that's hanging on my walls. I suddenly grokked in fullness that I'm done with the painter. I still like drawing, but I prefer the scale of things I can fit in my backpack, I prefer dry media that don't require using water I'd rather drink or use to make coffee or water plants, etc. just to make pretty pictures or keep a record of my unravelling. The short of it is I found an enthusiastic home for some canvases one of which was still empty and one that has an empty white canvas circle inside an india ink background. I'm downsizing in my drawing mode, but she's moving into a space where she needs more space to move things around. She's also more of a visual person than me so she might take to the painter naturally like I didn't. I also gave her the easel I had been babysitting for her that her mom donated to me from her store of unused art supplies way back (2005ish) when I was deep in the throes of my undoing posing as a painter.

So here's the social art project we dreamed up together: I took a couple of paintings out from behind the pile of old work I have in the Art Mausoleum I made around the landing at the top of the stairs in the house where I live and I said yeah they're kind of pretty, but they really belong in a graveyard. Sometime before the Aries equinox (end of March) I want to leave them in one. Next full moon perhaps? Maybe I'll leave them around the statue of Harvey Scott that looms over the south end of Mt. Tabor, pointing toward downtown, leading the people of the death culture to continue our rape of the planet onward and westward, puffing his chest out and scowling. To me that statue is a kind of grave. Leaving the paintings that are pretty, but really part of my unravelling process and not something I want hanging on my walls around a big symbol of death seems like just the purge I need to go where I need to go and do what needs doing. I don't need all that dead weight anymore.