Mere Mortals

So it is difficult to reveal oneself and difficult to know when we meet someone if we have met them. I've been reading "I am not Jackson Pollock" and it is clear that the people in the story don't know Jackson but even more so that Jackson doesn't know Jackson. So no matter how genuine he attempts to be, the challenge is insurmountable.

A friend wrote to me today, "I think I have been misjudging you slightly on something which may not be true at all...." Well, the misjudge, misstep, misalignment, is one of the banes of man's existence. All we have are our sense and our perceptions and our own histories which are never exactly what someone else has experienced. So people layer meaning onto what they can see and touch but that is no measure for accuracy.

Neena Birch is a wonderful artist and yesterday at an art show in DC, she told me that as she studied this technique or some particular aspect of the art process, that she moved away from herself; "Such that sometimes you lose who you are. You get lost." She's right, of course. Having been lost repeatedly in so many years, the excitement is when you find yourself (as no doubt she does continually)!

Creation of something brand new is altered the minute outside influence falls upon it. But I know she hasn't lost herself in any fashion in which she has not also discovered some other aspect of herself, because her work is strong, solid. And the portent of it cannot be missed. Something is happening, something strong, shapely, meaningful, and yet, utterly without the artist and from within. This is what art is, how life is made, how we express what we can, being mere mortals.

This in life is also how we sometimes misjudge, although I am sure my friend meant misunderstand, one another. Because we see it all through our life's spectacles, tinted or now we have altered from the prescription. Things don't fit, the frame does not hold; until we widen the lens and allow for a bigger picture.