Just published e-book on Lulu.com

http://www.lulu.com/content/1064343

http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=1198115

Hope to publish more of my works and writings there and recommend LULU to you!

"And Thou Art" .. we are One with all things, or so it feels in certain moments. I found an interesting fellow, Dr. Alesha Sivartha (1834-1915). He was a writer and an illustrator of life, I was looking at his drawings and his words. He seemed to have that zeal for life itself, in understanding it, in feeling it.

Sometimes you have people life Dr. Sivartha or Leonardo da Vinci and sometimes you have people smoking on a street corner asking for nickels and dimes, dodging the blue and red lights. You have genius and you have survival. You have knowledge and you have addiction. You have mind expansion and mind deflation. You have close-friends and you have stranger-friends, whom you see every 20 years or so, like a shooting star.

http://nichirenscoffeehouse.net/Sivartha/index.html

Let me tell you what is happening.

A man at the train station saw my art work in the folder portfolio. He happened to be one of the directors of the art guild and recreation centers in Rahway. His name is Ally. He said when he returns from vacation he wants to give me exposure in Rahway, and maybe other places. My sister said the other Art director was asking about me and wants me to work in his art gallery, the Art Guild in Rahway. Out of nowhere this happened.

I went to a poetry reading in New York at the Planet One Cafe, with my friend Isaiah, who is a DJ and spinner, poet and educator of world history. A woman there saw some of my work and is interested in somehow exposing it. She said now she is working with a French artist painter in curating his show. She is a curator.

I am taking a sculpture class with Seth Goodwin, the director of the Red Saw Gallery. He has been offering me much advice and coucil. He has been on me about getting a website, and suggested a man by the name of Sebastian, his former roomate, who lives now in Jersey City. So I might be meeting with him to begin that process.

Lets see what will happen ...

I've been working in the art Gallery at Kean. The current Exhibition is Called East TRansplanted West. 7 Chinese Artists in America.

Behind all of this I am filled with assignments and projects for school, and paintings and collages and realtor magazine comic books with homeless drawings glued and juxtaposed onto black and white houses of stone and brick, glass and fancy railings. Imagine that! I'm trying to travel to every train station on the two rails that I ride, from north to south of New Jersey. I just feel that expressing the emotion and reality and fantasy and allegory of New Jersey can be seen through the destination and departing stops of our lives, sip sip, puff puff, hello hello, snap snap, play play, hey hey, scream screaM !

I paint AL and DErick, major works I feel, LArge. More paint than usual. More COllage. More texture in the face of AL. More interior emotion and narrative in the body of Derick. Backgrounds merge with Foregrounds. Works look like palets, works are becoming like Sketchbooks, works are coming alive, I feel.

I spoke with my one painting instructor, who is Polish, and a great figurative painter, who shows in Chelsea, NEw York. She said a lot of my art work was derivative of modern art, like Chagall or Basquiat, because I wrote text in my art work or painted a face with a double eye or tilted head. I didn't know what to really feel. I understand it is important to be aware of your influences, to know who came before you and who did what. She did say the work was mine and that it was very personal.

When I paint I try to paint the series of sights and sensations that have somehow found there way to my eye and mind and soul, and I try to transfer these kinetic spasms and splotches of color and beams that carry word into a painting, or whatever you call my works, maybe just art. an art of something. I'm trying, I am really trying, to just paint for the sake of living and trying to extend the image like a limb or a bough or a bridge to the stranger man or the stranger woman, to weld experience and dream, thoughts and storms.

This is what has been happening ...

Sometimes I think that the process of creating art, i.e. photographing, sketching on trains, painting stains on cotton canvas, sitting and listening to music, glueing scraps of paper, smudging oil on clothes, I sometimes think it is something just of my own world, my own subjective interpretation, or understanding, of this world around my eyes, and that maybe it isn't so important.

But then when the art itself, by itself, looks back at me, it is a look of powerful Spirit and greater than anything I intended, immersing my self into the art so deep that it is now impossible to abandon this life of creation, or so it feels. To look at the process, to see it developing and docking like the boats at bay, buzzes the mind and brings a joy to the Spirit.

This here is a close-up of one of the works in the show at Red Saw Gallery. I centered in on the sketch book, which is close in this photo, but the viewer can feel free to open it and look inside, to see the drawings, the other people the artist saw and heard. The sketch book was a way to include them. IT was a way to let them in, to offer another dimension, more space. There is always enough room. We can always find a way. But that is not the only reason. I want the viewer to look at the work as if it is like a story, for it to be an intimate encounter, a searching, a reading, a discovering. Like when reading books or a novel or an art journal or your long lost mother's diary that she might have left behind.

The tips of tubes
are now chimneys
and smoke-stacks,
oozing with paint,
paint as puffs of smoke.

I have been lacking in the reading. I have been caught up underneath the bridge for most of my days...

Sometimes I do not even recognize my own working.
Things just happen.

This is a drawing I drew on my couch last night. In time it will be my next painting, I think. A Large painting because is it an epochal moment in the history of AL and his only daughter. She finds him in the TunneL and runs to him. She's been looking for her father, AL, for 20 years. Through word of the Street she finally learned he stood in the tunneL at the train station. She falls to his feet and begins to cry. AL doesn't understand. But then he is overcome by her high voltage of love, her tears electricity at his toes. He falls to the ground with her and asks, "Who, who are you?" But then he doesn't need an answer because somehow he knows it is his daughter. She leans her head on his shoulder as he is renewed and regained by this unforseen happening in tiMe. The MirAcLe of AL.