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When we paint, we wish to communicate something. Our Life? A Civil Rights Act in the 60's? A devastating moment for all of humanity in history, which connects the work with universal emotions? Ancient Greek Mythology and how we interpret it in our everyday experience? The icons and words of ancient China, Japan, India or Ireland? Some mask, or some symbol, popping to the surface like balls of lava, exploding hot liquid, like the way farina does in the pot on the stove when you don't stir it enough.
The train wheels of my mind do not stop, even in dreams, or the realm between reality and dream, the unconscious. There exists a presence of figure and object; abstract or expressionistic; cube-like or anatomically composed; impressionist or fauvist in color; mixtures of blurs and blazes; feet treading across the inner landscape and through all of this psychological activity, one looks for a door, a crack, a color, an association, a yoke that is light, a salvation that delivers all of humanity ... One wants rest, one does not wish to worry, one lays in the fields and listens to the wild horses shake the earth, in this state of mind or spirit or soul, one tries to find what is it that is their own.
What is our own in the boundless imaginations of the mind? What curves and lines can we lay out on wood or paper; canvas or dirt; sand or slab of sidewalk, where the little ones play hop-scotch. Yes, those little ones that Jesus talks about: "Only if you become like the little ones will you enter the Kingdom of Heaven"; you hope that there is still enough "child" in you, because those words, when thought about, do appear to make sense in this state of mind ... then little Pip comes and pulls your hair, telling you to wake up in the language of a 2 year old.
I painted the wood black, an acrylic black. With a house brush, spread it out like you do a cake. I drew people across the tracks the other day, not looking at my page, just at the people - standing and waiting; phones and pockets; buying tickets or drinking coffee; smoking cigarettes; or looking at the people across the tracks like I was doing; women resting their heads on their lovers; babies drinking juice from a bottle in their carriage. I cut these figures out with an edged-razor; and after this writing, will modge-podge them on to the scene - just the white figures on a straight line across the station. With enamel paint, I let the brush create a likeness of buildings in the background. It is black, white, and gray. But one thing I forgot to mention: before everything, I laid down 3 strips of masking tape, vertically, and after laying down the paints, I pulled them back, and so the color of the wood is seen. Why do we do such things? I believe sometimes we have to wait and find out, and it will be made known to us.
I bought a canvas almost half the size of my wall. I do not know what is to come of it. Time will let me know, the dreams will tell me, the voices in the dark will whisper.
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Daniel Brophy
Homelessness. Poverty. Hunger. Men under bridges with rain dripping on their scruffy faces.
Every day I am exposed to these tragedies. I can't help but to address them, somehow. But in them, in the corners, in the cracks of the paint, or on the walls in graffiti, their is some message of hope for the viewer. I guess what I want to say is this - in our darkest most depressing of times, there is hope, we just have to find it, to look at our life, to listen to it, and find it.
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