AAAAAAhhhhh. Feel the nice cool water on your feet. Quiet lake. Monday in summer.

Hunter and Lynn are here and life is good. They arrived yesterday in time to overlap with Samsun and friends and the talk was lively in the short overlap. So when someone asked the question, what do you do? and I heard the answer, “I’m dealing with the question of what it means to be human, I thought, wow, that’s the best answer I’ve ever heard. Isn’t it? Don’t you want to believe that about your work?

I’ve giving short shrift to the profundity of Lynn’s answer, starting with the most primitive notion of heaven and earth, and then watching how Copernicus’s discovery of the atmospheric components repositioned that divide, which led to the notions of some people “closer to God” than others, onward, onward. That’s short shrift.

And then, of course there are the Chinese, on their own path of understanding heaven and earth, and somehow along the way, the pictographs (v. the alphabet) led to a much more nuanced, less “scientific” interpretation of reality or what it means to be human. More allowance for emotion, even an appreciation for it.

Which is what Matisse found and loved about Chinese art.

Bringing all this back to simple, simple, simple… Just color. Just noticing. In the color pieces I’ve been doing…

Yes summer is here. Summer days. Feet in the lake. And my tight coils of red? Look at them loosen up (on the right):