Michael David Jewell - Vermont Artist & Poet

“For sixty years I have been forgetful,
every minute, but not for a second
has this flowing toward me stopped or slowed.
I deserve nothing. Today I recognize
that I am the guest the mystics talk about.
I play this living music for my host.
Everything today is for the host.”

Here are the three letters which inspired the creation of this Website. First an e-mail to me from Virginia Greene (e-mail: thespidermonkey@yahoo.com) describing something of her approach to doing art and wondering if I had a similar process. The second letter is my answer, and the third sees Virginia again e-mailing me, about art and poetry, wishing there were some place where such ideas could be hung on the walls like paintings. Perhaps this section, under the heading entitled “Guests” could go part of the distance to granting Virginia’s wish, in the virtual world. I play this living music for my host.

this is virginia. and this is a long note! Perhaps you ought to get a cup of chai before reading this :)

i am so glad you are painting - painting "a-way". you know there are few of us out there. well, maybe there are many, many thousands clustered in new york, radiating all the painting vibes in the universe, but it is a lonely business i suspect.

so i have taken to working on paintings at odd hours. the past year since i left my full-time job at the bank has been one of the best of my life. but it certainly wasn't what i expected. i expected in my wild delusion to be painting all day and night and each painting would build upon the last such that at the end of this outpouring i could pick the 10 best paintings for a small, but elegant show!

well, it hasn't quite work out that way! instead i spend many hours sitting on this orange furry chair
that we bought at ikea alternately staring at my little black kitten named rauschenberg (after robert rauschenberg the painter & collage & video king) and at whatever piece i am working on. at first i did a flurry of paintings in wildly different styles - actually i am still very much experimenting. this sometimes makes tinker mad (as in slightly befuddled versus angry) since he does not understand why i can't continue a theme from a previous painting. i tell him i have no control over it - i just do whatever comes out and whatever i most feel like doing at the moment i am actually in front of the piece. Is this your process, too?

i have sometimes tried to be more conscious and tried to have a "vision" of what i want but usually, actually, almost always, that vision is exactly what gets me stuck and in trouble. i find it easier to move when there is just a hint of what i want, like a feeling of a certain color or a memory of two colors that i might have seen, say on a wall outside. i think about walls alot actually, and how paint is used to cover up graffiti - some of my best colors come from market street walls. yet i know of friends who are painters who indeed have a vision and they paint that vision, or the vision just gets more intense and they build on it, so it depends i guess on each person.

so lately i have been painting until 1 a.m. or so then have trouble sleeping so i look at an art book and kind of absorb the pictures. i am looking a lot at a painter named bruno fronseca, diebenkorn (of course, how can you escape him here in california) and manuel neri who is more noted as a sculptor than painter although he is equally a master of both.

last night i was feeling that painting is a lot like music in that you want to hit the right note but you want a variety of brushstrokes and marks and colors. then there is the problem of CONTRAST that pesky little aspect of the muse. sometimes i forget contrast since i get so swept away by certain color combinations. then i take the painting out into the living room (where there is more space) and look at it from afar and my heart sinks when i realize there indeed is no contrast!

i have also been painting over a lot of paintings and feeling that these disappeared paintings are as important as the manifested ones. do you agree? is that your experience? yet nobody knows they exist. but they do.

so now things are slowing down for me. I am finding it hard to put things down that i don't feel are genuine - i really have to feel that a color is right or that the brushstroke is passionate in some way. so sometimes i spend an hour staring and then just a few seconds putting something there. then i worry that i am thinking too much.

well, i hope i haven't overwhelmed you. i just felt that i could tell you this because really it is hard to talk about painting. when people ask me how its going i just say OK or "its harder than i thought." i've given up on trying to explain what i am doing since it comes out all rambly and vague, like cobwebs are in my throat or something.

i am sending you one finished piece as an attachment - hope it comes through OK. (most of what i am working on right now is more abstract than this although i did finish a portrait of che guevarra who is now upside down in our hallway)

also, tinker and i miss you very much. we hope you can visit us here soon some time soon. is that perhaps a possibility?

Hi Virginia,

Here I am, still not having answered your last letter in terms of what I think or feel about art, but I suppose I could start?

1. When we are painting, we are at the same time being painted.

(Here I don't mean in the conventional sense of dripping paint all over ourselves, but I suppose that is also inevitable.....It is we who are being painted, in the process of our painting a painting.)

2. Painting is most basically a visceral event, but it seems that in the Midst of it all, it becomes at the same time ethereal, as if it is infused with intangible light.

(Like a good poem, which links heaven and earth, any artwork soars while it sinks its feet even deeper into the mud!)

3. Painters who become great successes externally should damn well know who they are before the world starts beating a path to their doors. Or at least know that they don’t know.

(Lookit’ poor Jackson Pollack, jaded in front of the Camera. Listen to a tape of ranting Sylvia Plath reading from Colossus....there is greatness there but thwarted.)

4. Painting can become either a path to self knowledge, or a path to oblivion.,

(There is nothing intrinsically enlightening about practicing any art form, or engaging in any activity, but it is how we use it that makes a difference. It is the "practicing" part that makes the difference.)

5. Abstract art does not necessarily mean obtuse art.

(In once sense the way we use the word abstract in art is very different than how we use it in poetry. The best abstract art can be very "concrete." In poetry, we often say "merely" abstract.)

6. It's helpful using a color wheel at first when taking up painting, the same way using a thesaurus is good for a poem, when we take poetry up. But when art or poetry takes us up the color wheel is internalized, the thesaurus is obsolete.

(The tool must be transcended....I think of what Randal Jarrel said once of another poet's work:
"That sounds like it was written on a typewriter by a typewriter!")

7. There are of course certain colors one shouldn't do without. The primaries of course. But over time I think every artist expands from there in an intensely personal way. Our so-called palate is a very unique thing, special to us. Maybe it even has something to do with the color of our aura, which is different for everyone.

(We have to find our particular color scheme, and until we do, we will never be happy with our art....also, our color scheme changes as we change, as our aura changes...there is a funny section in a fairly funny movie which you might have seen, called "The Mighty Wind." There were a couple of folk singers in one scene who explain that their God is Color: pure saturation which is behind all creation....In the movie this was supposed to be parody, but in a strange way I can take the statement seriously.)

8. Art can be a door to Joy.

(Now that I include four year old Marla Olmstead, along with Kandinsky, Miro, Roerich, and Chagal as painters who have influenced my style, and point the way for further work, I can say this about joy. If joy is worth seeking, the same way wisdom is, then art can be both joyful and wise.

9. Another name for Art is Joy.

(this is the next step, and I know many artists will disagree. What was it Tinker's friend Kush said: "Poetry is the heart at liberty."

10. No joy and no wisdom came without day to day discipline.

(Now, excuse me, this almost sounds like I'm talking about a life of meditation here....and the statement may not be true for dolphins.)

11. Using “a tiny, tiny brush” at the right time, is like knowing when to use a comma to change the entire meaning of a poem. But more so, the right color in such a circumstance can change the entire nuance of the whole work. There is no way to see ahead just how, especially in a free form abstract painting, that strives always to defy the rules of proper technique....which are just the fossils of someone's inspiration that exist, somehow, to instruct and show the way, but were never meant to tie us down.

(Too bad those little 00 brushes are so frail. We too are frail. Or as Rumi said: Look at your eyes.
They are small. And yet they see so many vast things....")

That's all for now. I don't have the stove on and I'm starting to catch a chill...so I've got to stop and load the fire.

Warm Regards
Michael

I'll try to be less "abstract" next time!

Hi! I am sorry it took me a while to write back – I just have to say before anything how much Tinker and I love your painting images that you sent through cyber-space.

I immediately thought of William Blake - the light, the color, the feeling that there is another world that embraces us, the general warmth of the pieces. I also thought of Ryder in terms of the substance of the pieces.

I feel it is very difficult to do space and color and light as you have done without the work feeling "airy" and insubstantial, or referring to a known sky. For as much as I love the master Turner, I always still feel there was/is something very intellectual and holding back in his work - I feel your work, however, is very giving - it flows out.

And I loved the colors - the "sun/moon" in the center of the middle image that you sent in your first email was really mysterious - a very friendly cosmos I felt!

Also I very much enjoyed your painting thoughts. I think your work is very much about the Color/Aura as Spirit. (I also laughed outloud when you clarified that we aren't literally being painted and also at the comment about dolphins!)

I can imagine your painting thoughts as a broadside - much as some poems are published so that one can "take away" the work at bookstores, etc. Wouldn't that be wonderful to have at a book or art store - I just don't think there is enough writing about the process of making art.

I think your thoughts also reminded me that painting and poetry are very much linked, something that was also reinforced by seeing a local exhibit last week of California artists influenced by poetry.

If I think back at the art work that most interests me, both from that exhibit and my own work, it does have a poetic quality. I realize I am probably using the word "poetic" here in a broad, sweeping way without the day-to-day understanding of what it might be like to be a crafter of words. So to be more specific I think a work, for me, has to feel that there is a mystery and ambiguity there, a living presence as well as a sense that something is being generously transmitted through the piece.

As far as our day-to-day existence, this has been a difficult week for us both! Tinker has had this respiratory infection/flu for two weeks now - he is getting better but it is a slow process.

This week I went through a mini panic attack about all that I still have to do to get ready for the upcoming show in May. It was a combination of anxiety during the day and insomnia at night! The space easily holds up to 40 or 50 pieces. I realized that in order to have time to frame everything I essentially needed to know what was definitely "in" and what was definitely "out". So I've been making lists and categorizing and agonizing about which pieces go with what - all when I'd rather be just concentrating on the next painting.

I have for the past year been working on large-size, fragile pieces of paper that are difficult to hang and store. Not worrying too much about working in a "series", I have just been following whatever I felt moved to paint at the moment. So this means I also have lots of pieces of varying scale done in different mediums - watercolor, charcoal, acrylic, oil, ink, marker, collage on paper and wood.

A friend helped me today to sort through much of it - and little poetic resonances "happened" - I saw groupings of figures with works about flowers and plants that resonated with each other. So things didn't seem as fragmented after all!

Anyway, let's keep in touch - I hope things get resolved with your computer too. Please send me images of your work as you are able.

Cheshire cat sitting at the corner of the letter A has painted away her
tongue and her eyes,

parted and doubled and intrinsically woven to catch in that net the
intangible light. Light being caught

who ever since wanted to run over her with success and externality- but
she took the remembrance of one of her eyes and

she found greatness thereafter with wellphrased twolegged jambusses only
- called greyhound jam busses-

to catch a poor chicken - called sense- in such a colorful downpour's
ethereal net.-

they discussed (the cat and her shadow) the concrete reality of the
ultimate real concrete. So after ages of mixing the concrete

-as known throughout all transcendence- the tool must be dropped and
hidden behind its idea and thus the true transformation of red into blue
can appear.

the eyes of the chicken thus widened as the artist expanded intensely
and finally was exploded into a seriously mighty spherical joy

and all doors with and without names, manmade, now melted to colorless
marmalade.

and art the newborn babe cried while being baptized to be named as jojo,
but godmother wisdom took a tiny little nightingale feather and added a
tiny little y to the name.

What a delightful poem! I'd love to meet Pollack the Jackal! I'm sure Rothko the Raccoon would have a few words with him. (this is of course near and dear to my heart as i have a collection of stuffed animals all named after artists and writers so it all seems very natural to me that animals should have artists' names. . .)

so the open studios went well - the front part of our home is temporarily transformed into a gallery and the basement is CLEAN ("the seventh wonder of the world" as tinker calls it) and although open studios is over (for us this weekend anyway) we can't bear to put things back to "normal". Half of our bedroom now looks like a kitchen as we had to stash shelves & serving platters & cooking pots in there but there is space & it is nice to have space.

a very nice woman who was here several days after open studios for a meeting of the "lord byron society" as i like to think of them - they are actually a group that Tinker is in that meets every week to read Byron's Don Juan - remarked that she, too, loves to make things, collages especially but that she can't stand the "mercantile aspect" of art. I feel the same way but then i think about all the artists that have ever existed that have had to sell their art to eat and then it really changes things, makes it harder to make that distinction because not everybody is at the same economic reality.

so i guess ideally there is an honest exchange that can happen. i felt it with one man who was so enthusiastic, he is a collector from a town about an hour's drive south who really wanted one of my old drawings that was framed but hidden away in the basement.

but the best part for me of the whole thing was that we met many people from the neighborhood who it seems were just jumping at the chance to get to know their neighbors. we even met a couple up the street on Rivera who apparently are good friends of our little black cat Rauschenberg, only we didn't know it! seems that during the day Rauschenberg likes to sprint several yards across into their house and have a sniff around their kitchen. he never lets them touch him though and he doesn't eat anything, he just likes to check their house out as part of his route. you know michael, out here it can be very isolated even though all the houses literally bump up against each other. if you think about it there are very few events - none really - where we get to just visit our neighbors. we don't even have block parties here! so it was great to meet all these people and just chat. the day was a perfect October San Francisco day which means warmth & sunshine & no fog so lots of folks

strolled through the front room & kitchen looking at paintings, peeked into my studio to see two more paintings and then headed to the basement for more paintings and then out into the garden into the sunshine for wine & cheese.

i did sell a painting on paper called "spirit lily" to a neighborhood couple. i've attached a photo of it.

i had my first intro to Sanskrit class on Wednesday and i felt like the slowest person in the class mostly because i was embarrassed about not being able to pronounce it correctly. the instructor would say something and then call on us to pronounce a word and it just took me back to grammar school and i felt a huge anxiety followed by anger (which happens when i get embarrassed) and i could actually feel my throat constricting and my heart beating very rapidly! this made it difficult to simply listen to what the instructor was saying. fortunately there are handouts to study and i got a CD that has a person reciting the Sanskrit alphabet so maybe I will get it after all. i am just realizing more and more how much i like to control the outcome of things - for example, i want to excel in this subject so much that then the opposite happens, i freeze up! its like a curse but maybe a good curse, that is meant to direct me in a different direction . . .it is very similar to painting

and when i get the idea in my head that "I" am doing something to create something or that "I" have to get x number of paintings finished then I almost always get stuck & frustrated. So more letting go for me (why did i hope it would ever end?)

I did finish a large horizontal painting called Garden With Pomegranates that I really like. Lots of olive green shades & naples yellow and bits of much stronger cadmium yellow shining through and lots and lots of drawing mixed into the paint. I based it very, very loosely on a photograph of some wild grasses and plants growing along a favorite hiking path up in Point Reyes near the coast on the way to Arch Rock. Perhaps we have taken you there? Anyway, I loved the pattern that this dried plant made of lots of tiny, furry white seed heads alternating with dark patches of bushes & then vertical stripes of dried thin grass blades. What's new for me is that I've been using a lot of Sumi Ink and bamboo sticks with the acrylic paints to create a looser line. The whole feeling is more like Asian Art to me than Western. I've also just started reading a book about the paintings & calligraphy of a Chinese painter named Bada Shanren (1626-1705) who was born into a branch of the Ming

Tinker has posted a bunch of our Alaska photos from late August with his personal captions on a website that you can access. I don't have the address of the site but we'll email it to you as soon as I do.

this week for my Yoga Sutra class which is my favorite subject in the world we have been given the optional assignment (isn't everything an optional assignment really?) of keeping a private journal and trying to for the next five days to just observe how many times we adhere to and/or violate the principles of ahimsa, satya, absteya, aparigraha & brachmacaraya (one principle per day). we are not suppose to change our behavior, just observe this.

So Michael, how is your art work going? Your writing? How are you feeling these days, what are you thinking?

More letters are likely to follow, from us and others, if this is a conversation we continue.