Worldinnerspace

I just finished reading You Must Change Your Life – The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin by Rachel Corbett. As of this date, it’s my favorite book of this year. I’ve always been a Rilke fan, reading and re-reading Letters to a Young Poet and Letters on Cezanne, but after reading You Must Change Your Life, I have more insight into the personalities, anxieties and gifts of both these men.

Three pages from the end of the book, I read words that reminded me of a painting I did in 2013. I named it “Becoming Whole” but didn’t think that said enough. I changed it to “As a Willow,” trying to bring out the tree that was part of the young man’s face. Today, I changed the title to “Worldinnerspace,” a word Rilke coined “to describe the space where the barriers between the internal and external collapsed onto a single plane. It is a realm where the self is like a bird flying soundlessly between the sky and the soul, he said. Rilke accepts the concept as both a contradiction and a reality in a poem titled “Worldinnerspace”: “O, wanting to grow, / I look out, and the tree grows in me,” he writes.

“Worldinnerspace” was painted in early February, 2013, 20 x 20” and is many layers of acrylic, some of which were poured over the entire canvas. I used brushes to develop the face, the partial faces and the tree.

At the Outdoor Cafe

In March, my friend Liz spent a couple of weeks in Paris and Berlin. Mixed in with brief texts about art galleries, museums, the cemetery where Susan Sontag was buried and The Shakespeare & Company bookshop were comments about cafe hopping. I began to see images of the outdoor cafes I had frequented while in Germany and I knew Paris would have even more. An integral part of life, the cafes offer a sense of community -  opportunities of conversation with both friends and strangers, a place to work or write while still among people. But cafes are also places to just be - places where no one gives a second thought to a person sitting alone with a drink, a book or a laptop.

Now you can create your own story about an afternoon at the outdoor cafe.

At the Outdoor Cafe was painted with acrylics and a palette knife.

They Come to Sing the Blues

For three years, I sang in a bar - just me and my guitar amidst the quiet and the rowdy, the depressed and the happy. If I sang something they knew, they joined in. If they didn't know the song, they kept talking or continued to stare into their chosen drink. When I took a break, they talked - about anything and everything.

This painting reminded me of those days and I thought of Billy Joel's Piano Man - the embattled aspirations of the people around the bar and how much easier it was to become another person in the dusky-dark of the place.

They Come to Sing the Blues is a satirical look at the people in the bar, singing with the piano man -  inhibitions dropped, personalities changed, singing to another life.

This painting used a limited palette of gray-green, black and white acrylic on watercolor paper and was created with a brush and a palette knife.