greentea flute's photostream

Hi, there, I have been suffering from delirium of late, last 3 yrs., seriously, so my artwork production has been mostly cerebral and film or photo oriented, as opposed to drawing or making sculptures

...if I left a silly or dadaist-sounding comment on your stream, please forgive me if I offended you, certain images reduce me to a semi-autistic state, and I enter a surreal realm, though I forget that for many, sadly, life is not a stage, though for us all it is absurd or veers close to ....

I fell ill because of two spider bites .... for the last seven years, I worked to create a nature preserve, and succeeded, no pesticides, no insecticides, letting the garden turn back into a meadow, no fishing in the pond ....... herons, hares, deer, martins, at least one red squirrel, wood rats, mice, voles, polecats, hedgehogs, snakes, lizards and salamanders appeared, .... problem was, I ended up with poisonous spiders the size of your hand in my house ......which bit me (Mars et Ottobre 2008) and I fell ill, so I could not paint at all, de Aout 2008 a Avril 2009, and spent much of that time in severe pain and delirium, but am much better now. (Aout 2011), though drawing eludes me ... I still write ....

When I was in art school (2001 - 2006), I thought that "one day, after art school, when I have become an artist," I would draw and paint the images that would become known as "my art." I thought that all of the "exercise" drawings and paintings I did were only exercises. Now, I realize that those exercises were my art, just as you reading this are living your life.

Those exercises I did in art school -- copies of surrealist or abstract expressionist paintings, endless drawings of pictures from magazines and catalogs, paintings of flowers seen from my window or in the garden -- was an exercise, but also my art, because I was choosing what to draw or paint from a huge selection, choosing what was close to my heart, what I thought I might want to learn to do better for "when I became an artist."

Now, five years after graduation, as I catalogue those "exercises" here on flickr, I see, with a touch of shock and humility, just how much those exercises were my art. And I like my art, as different and as "unprofessional" as it might appear in some regards.

Verism is the artistic preference for contemporary everyday materials instead of the heroic or legendary in art and literature; a form of realism. The word comes from Latin verus (true).

Though I find the chaos of this time engendering in me a greater affinity for photos of abandoned machines and neat old stuff that recall a certain nostalgia ......and I hope to reflect this in my drawings, when I draw again .... in galleries the qualifications for mass popularity and the definition of art were getting really slushy (there’s no wrong or right way) I have a feeling that this current second stage of the dark time is going to call for a new formalism, just my guess. I think random piles of junk and absurdism in art will be replaced by a call from The Establishment for a new aesthetic classicism. Be sure to iron your tunic ....

more re: moi, I am still trying to support myself through my paintings and my writings, and have always thought of myself as a poet, artist, essayist, and serial novelist, always, too, in search of agents, publishers, and galleries.

I used to be much more social, though always a bit stand-offish. Writing my novels and painting pictures brings me more solace now.

I am a student of psychology, sociology, zoology, and finance, a nature-lover, an amateur athlete (once), and a musician seemingly stuck at intermediate beginner. I also like the vibrant elegance of certain cities, but more now, I live for the country and seashore, for warm seas, poetry, music, and transcendent ecstatic experience.

My understanding and appreciation of aesthetics includes the nude human figure, though I myself paint mostly flowers, trees, boats, furniture, bridges, portraits, and fashion models. The work of many artists and writers I think great is still considered controversial or even pornographic by some, including government agencies. Footnote here to "The Nude," by Kenneth Clarke, and the course in the Harvard department of Fine Arts by the same name. Writers and artists I admire who remain controversial include Sappho, and many of the other ancient Greek classicists, plus Walt Whitman, Anais Nin, Jean Cocteau, Egon Schiele, John Cage, Pablo Picasso, Rodin, Camille Claudel, Michelangelo, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, John Updike, Robert Mapplethorpe, Patti Smith, David Sallé, and a host of people making what I think are wonderful drawings, paintings and pictures here on flickr.

I regret that my choices as favorites may be thought by some to be in bad taste, but I can only recall the exhibition Hitler staged in the mid-1930's (for those very few who have any knowledge of history) of what the Third Reich called "Degenerate Art," most of which was then or later became the foundations of the Western modern aesthetic.

There is already so much dishonesty, divisiveness and rancor, not to mention outright murder, in our society today, I hate to see flickr used for anything but cooperative, supportive, encouraging ends, rather than as a place to vent moral or ethical opprobrium from a presumed higher ground, which is, of course, the sign of a dark age, which we seem to have entered. We come here from different time zones and cultures, and are of different ages, of different educational backgrounds and religious orientations, not to mention sexual preferences.

P.S. I was born near New Mexico's warm sunny fertile farmlands, when they played honkey-tonk on the radio and drove bubble-shaped cars, and I was raised in too quiet, almost-liberal, middle-class suburbs, until, tempted by books and films, I discovered the joys of an urban experience: the rooftops of Brussels, Rome, Athens and Paris, underground bars that spoke German and featured rock bands, I heard Puerto Ricans scream at each other through sunny windows, someone playing the piano, or hammering at Chopin two floors below all day (I finally went down and discussed the concept of the right notes versus the right feeling), the honking taxi-cab symphonies in NYC between cocktails and theater, and again between theater and dinner, and then, of course, girl friends two flights up. Then came break-ins and arson-fires. One day I wandered out of the cities where I had lived.

I then entered a world full of wooded seashores and of wild roses growing beside falling-down barns, and though for years I had slept through the harsh metallic screaming of the streetcar braking on its steep hill, I haven't heard a streetcar for awhile. I miss crowded sushi bars, people-watching on Madison Avenue, playing frisbe with school children on La Reforma, used book stores, art gallery openings, and watching the bus pass, full of people I will never know. But I don't think I am going back anytime soon. Too much do I crave watching another mushroom rise from beside a rotting log while a thrush scolds me for intruding too far into her blackberry patch. I drink green tea in the afternoon, and in the little amphitheater I have created in the cherry orchard, I play tunes on my flute that my mother hummed to me as a child.

now I am all of 61 yrs old, mighty proud of it, too, ma'am, and do enjoy the perspective