CONTEMPORARY EXPLORER

  I walked by it each work day, the building on Bay Street. It watched the city for many years, but had nothing to say. The spark of life gone from its eyes. Only the changing light and time of day made it look different.  You wondered what it had been all those years. Shops and people once there, I knew not who now. Each day I would walk by the building on Bay Street. It said nothing, but maybe ask why I did so. Why, when there was so much of the world to see...

  You find them all around, where things don’t fit together right. Like broken pieces of glass we can’t walk over. We pass them quickly, not wanting to spend the time understanding or finding our way through. We prefer the well ordered in life. The tree lined street or row of stores we know. Still scattered places somehow linger on our mind, like unfinished business. Often these scenes that don’t have much love in them. They stand out in the desert against the vastness, adding mystery and intrigue. Urban areas are different. The parts closer together, but still a disorder to them. The best ones have an area of calm. Space we can use to try to figure them out.  Their appeal may be the scenes themselves, their uniqueness or maybe the unfinished edges of our own lives..

  The world spins around. Fortune can be a phone call or right word away. You have to be an optimist and hope dreams are not interrupted by reality...

  A walk around AT HOME box store, Carolina Place Mall

  The thing I most admire about artists is their ability to make art look simple to do. You think, wow I could do that in a flash, but then try. It’s not so simple. Three artists who excelled in making things look simple were Joan Miro, Cy Twombly and Picasso. The drawings of all three display this ability the most. Twombly could make random marks somehow come together in a symphony. Miro conjured up fanciful images with random lines and Picasso could draw anything seemingly without ever lifting the pencil from the paper. They all somehow rose above the dark abstraction of Pollock or the deep color studies of Rothko to create a more joyous world. These gifts did not come naturally, but were a learned skill over time. As Picasso once said, he worked all his life so he could finally do art like a child. I never hope to achieve artistic levels of these giants, but I can enjoy simple work along the way. Efforts that sometimes, yield surprises you might call art…

  FACTORY WINDOW Worker faces all the same Building cars, missiles, trucks. Worker faces all the same Behind these windows. Workers faces all the same Came and went each day. Workers faces all the same Only sound from work. Workers faces all the same Like machines within. Workers faces all the same No one ever knew their names. young '22