"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

RED SAW
Presents
PULP
works on paper

June 2nd-23
Reception June 2nd 6-9

Daniel Brophy
Sarah Davis
Matthew di Leo
Jerry Gant
Johann Joshnowitz
Michael Metzger
Erick Osman
Jesse Wright

Curated by Seth Goodwin
After party at 27MIX

Red Saw Gallery
585 Broad Street, Newark, NJ 07102
redsawart@gmail.com www. Redsawart.com
Open Thursdays 6-9 and by appt.

The "Works on Paper" show is coming up soon. IT is from June 2-26, at the Red Saw Gallery, redsawart.com is the website. I have been working for many hours, going through many cds of music, from rock, to pop, to classical, to electronic, moving fast and slow, organized and shuffled, nevertheless I have been on track painting these tracks. I've been superimposing my soul into these works. They are intimate works. They are like some of the earlier train station works, but something new about them is happening.

I've been growing more confident in the art. Some days I am not so confident. So I pray. I pray for the strength to believe and have faith. I pray that my mind will be calmed. I pray that the imagery of this life flows into it just enough so that I can create an important art for those who wish to look.

Tomorrow the gallery director comes to my studio. He will choose which ones he wants for the show. He said that he would like 5-7 of my works in the show. I hope some of them are not too big. I hope he likes what has happened in that attic over the past 2 weeks.

I've beeN Scribbling with Markers as of late. I've been scribbling like pip. Someone said in the dvd movie I made, that art is, "the sweat of the artist, the time, the tears they cried", all of this participates in the spirit of the painting, that which deeply connects us to the human part(s) of ourselves. Maybe the spirit is that which penetrates space, face, time, and causes or brings about a rippling of renewal.

I say this because I deeply believe aRt can chaNge lives, chaNge the worLd, unify and celebrate diversity at the same time, and I believe the spirit of a painting has something to do with this. When I see the scribbling pages of pip, I see masterpieces, I see something that makes me want to cry and smile, I see Beauty in the scribble, in the washable marker stains.

The movie is what it is, it is what people have said.

IT is the sound of trains, the beeping of cabs, the silence of night. In certain frames nothing happens, in others, everything happens, in the words of those who thought they didn't know what to say about art, but then really were overcome by something in them, as if it was ripping out of them, not in a painful way, but in a way of healing and love, art became something for them in those late hours of the night, and maybe will always be something.

I ask myself when will the door paintings be done? If I was Basquiat, art dealers would have come to my studio by now and taken them (Basquiat often accused his dealers of taking unfinished paintings). But I know I am not Basquiat.

Basquiat is a mystery to me and maybe he always will be. I salivate over his neo-expressionist way of painting, as critics and historians have labeled it. But do I label it that? I don't label it anything. IT is his art. Basquiat's art. The genius of Basquiat. I missed his show last year in the Brooklyn Museum because I didn't have the money to travel, or maybe I did at points, but I just didn't go. I missed out on a beautiful thing.

When I think of Basquiat, I think of the speed and flow of him creating, of him slapping the doors and canvas with paint. I wish I could meet the 45 year old Basquiat, but I cannot. What is taking AL's life, has taken his life. The heroin, the "Horse", the underground slang term for it.

I would say I am constantly living in the present, if I am not painting, I feel as if something is not right, or if I am not reading about the history of art and about other artists now, something is replacing the beauty that I most identify with. But then I think, life is art, art is life, linger in the laziness of life and paint and create out of the void, out of the numb noise, the line is uncontrollable because your inner consciousness is out of control, but then there are moments of calm.

I must tell you something, I sometimes feel as if the Institution is slowing me down, or interfering. IT gets in the way of me painting because I have to do other required assignments. But I cannot drop out. I should finish. I just can't wait for the day when I will paint all the time. I appreciate learning in the institution, it is for art, it is for future opportunity.