Now Is The Time

When you first learn to weld and you know the basics


 Morning Walk



you have an overwhelming desire to create something nice.

I encourage those I help to learn this skill to save their

first creations.  A year later, if they continue to practice,

they can look back on this experience and laugh.

  

 I still have a lot to learn, a lot of brushes that have never seen
paint, even paint not opened that has never seen a brush!
I am tired of landscapes already and realize they were just an exercise.  It could take me years to paint the perfect tree, a cloud that you could really see through or water that really looked wet.
Any landscape leaves the viewer with an attitude that they could do it better or certainly seen it better done.

I have learned shadows, light and dark, depth and focus.  I like some detail but not too much.  I like mystery to a painting.  Painting should be poetry.

So this is my "project piece" the one I will save and look back on it a year from now.  The intention is to get better and laugh!

More Early Stuff is here.

Jerry Carlin/poetry

Someone googled that, "Jerry Carlin/poetry" so I did too!  oh, it takes you here and there to bits of me, but no poems, no published volumes.  It doesn't even take you to my youth when I did write poetry.  One of the first rules of writing is to keep in mind your audience and I only wrote poetry for one.

   Writing is not difficult.  It is telling a story, setting a scene, creating a curiosity, a little mystery and a heroine.  It is a descriptive painting in words and can be told  layer by layer, each brush stroke singular and purposeful, shadows telling time.  Stories can be told after the fact, like restoring a Renaissance Painting, removing layers, chips of old paint to discover the original.

   I have time now, a luxury accumulated by accident, words come as a mist, swirl like snowflakes and disappear on the water's edge.  Difficult as catching kisses but I am going to try.

   It was easier to write in my youth when I had an audience, even if just one.  Easier to write when I didn't know the future and it was all make believe, imagination and dandelion wishes, flowers in a garden with no foot steps.

    All words now seem like travel writing, descriptions and places of where I have been and I wonder whether Shakespeare wrote love stories from memory?

   I might write poetry and I might not.  The truth is I do not know what I will write.  There is no story boiling within me and that makes it an exercise, doesn't it?

   You would think that at my age I would have discovered a truth worth telling but maybe the answer is "over easy", "medium well", not rare or well done at all, no extremes, careful planing on a course well set.

God that would be boring and so predictable and so not me at all.

   So, maybe I will find something, "start with the now" and go backwards or do what I have always done, jump ahead and fly!  Scenery, timing, shadows, water and moonlight, budding flowers and dancing butterflies, songs carried by the wind, a heroine, the temperature, what is happening everywhere and in a particular place and why we do things at all?

   It is all poetry, every bit of it, every syllable, every initial carved on a tree, every sunrise the first one and may be the last one. Every breath taken is poetry and I am honored to be googled together: Jerry Carlin and Poetry.

 My garden and other stuff is HERE

The Process of Art

   I am more interested in the process of art than art itself.  What is it about a person that would make him an artist?  What causes a drive toward excellence or the idea that tomorrow you can make something better?
The story of any particular artist is fascinating to me.
   Maybe it is true, we see the world in a different way or we see it as other's and wish to change it.  Perhaps it is just a different reaction to the world we all see?  I "art" therefore I am!  It is in the definition; it is who we are.

 Just a butterfly, colors from the torch.

   I think it is like personalities.  I am pretty convinced we are born with an attitude, our very being encrypted into our DNA.  You have it or you don't but it can be nurtured along the way, tempered and altered with experience and opportunity, small successes along the way.

   We can "learn art" from mentors or maybe a good art teacher along the way, someone to teach us the skills of an artist.

   But that won't make us an artist.  At some point we find a project, some idea we have to develop, some thought we wish to make material, some transference from the soul to the hands, a kind of poetry we wish to hold.  That is the moment when we become an artist.

My Art, my Garden and most of me can be found HERE

Tsunami

 Tsunami

How do you paint something beautiful, destroying something beautiful? or how would you put this to a poem?  I am mostly not a painter (but "I slept at the Holiday Inn last night"!).  I dabble in paint when words fail me.  I have an on going one sided argument with a friend of mine, one sided because she never responds, about what kinds of things may influence an artist. It is not really a difficult discussion, just imagine how you might be different if you painted one hundred years ago or five hundred?  Even today, they round up artists in some countries and shoot them if they paint the wrong things.  Or you start painting on shovel handles and you will never sell them!  Artists are influenced and we produce for customers but there are other influences. The ocean is not always serene and blue with white capped waves and sailing ships in the distance.  Two things have happened in one year that will forever, or for now anyway, alter our view of the oceans. One was man made with the oil spill in the gulf and we can discover our incredible power of destruction.  The other was the recent tsunami in Japan, the most destructive force in our lifetime!
     Sometimes, when I am at a loss for words I get the paints out and try to capture what I want to say.
More Paintings can be found HERE

More on Poetry

    You only get your first girlfriend once.  Mine twisted me upside down, flipped me backwards and stood me on my head.  I knew about poetry a little bit but she was pretty overwhelming, for a time my only every world.  I remember in college writing a million poems to her.  Slow mail days, I would receive one from her and write her six.  I was eager then too.  Those were the days when I wrote: poems and gibberish, short stories, love voodoo mist kinds of things.  Mostly then as I do now, trying to figure everything out, place meaning where there might be none.  It is strange the kinds of things we remember from our youth.  I can tell you of the day I met her.  I can quote conversation we had.  I remember ordering apple slices and wedges of cheese in a restaraunt and she was a Princess from another country at my side.
   I have saved the strangest things, bits and pieces from my youth.  I have all the old poetry, mine and hers
and reread them from time to time.  It is not with a longing or missing her, I understand that life goes on and we are far different people now, but I sometimes miss that boy that I was.
   I can't for the life in me remember exactly what happened and I have tried a hundred times to rediscover it.
I am pretty sure I didn't know it then.  Somehow we failed and lost a slippery hold, that happens.  She took with her my desire to write.  Now, almost forty-five years later I am digging amongst the ashes, piling cinder upon cinder in an attempt to create a fire.  If I can find that boy again, maybe now I can carry his hand and lead him to where he needs to be.  Aren't we all doing that in a way?  or trying to do it? or should do it but maybe we are not?
   Most of what I used to write is just plain garbage, like a fire gone amok, emotions tripped over contradicting descriptions, but I kept them as a journal, for one day I knew that I would like to know what I was.  Here is a poem I wrote 45 years ago:

The Painter

Capturing a moment in a gentle mist,
a simple canvas, lightly touched
pale blues and darker reds and
ivory colored lace
her skirt carried by the breeze.

Into lonely hours I paint continually
my hands and brush both heavy.
a moment more and face and hands
grow lily pink,
reflecting a caress of moon
along the strands of hair.

In her eyes, a little dark,
a blotch of blue waits for tomorrow
to complete the lake or pond,
as sleep is sinking, fills into my
bone, that I may dream and
she tease me out of thought.

                   April,'67 jac

Well, it is a poem and I won't explain it.  It could be anything you would like it to be, a chameleon poem.
You can find me HERE also

Two in One Day! or How I Taught Pamo to Poem!

What do you think? Am I?  Could be!

There is a certain nakedness about poetry that people are fearful of, too much fat or not pretty enough. That is the first concept you have to dump.  I suspect that writing poetry is not unlike selling motorcycles.  "Will it really go that fast?"  You are thinking yes it will, off a cliff maybe! and wondering why this fat middle aged dude even wants a bike in the first place!  You are not selling motorcycles, you are selling images, imaginations, fantasy.  "Oh yeah baby, you will look great and she will purr like a kitten!"
    Poetry isn't so much of writing about experiences as it is using your experience as a filter to explain the extrordinary or even the mundane of life.  Just like a motorcycle sale, you have 15 seconds in which to do it!  Words become carefully manipulated, crafted, honed, sharp and to the point.  You can't take back an uncomfortable kiss.  We have all had these; it is not necessary to describe your own, I can image mine.
That is the job of a poet, to create an image, and because mine might be different than yours it becomes dynamic and encourages conversation!  Then you can relax because you know that the motorcycle will sell itself!
So, my wonderful friend, Pamo, yes you would be a great neighbor! and you have given me a topic and I
attempt to stay with it this week, so more on this tomorrow!
My Other Blog is HERE:

When we were very young...

     When I say that I would return to my youth in a heartbeat, well, I think that I should explain that a bit more.  I was not a girl chaser so it was not that.  I have always thought that it is more significant to make love a thousand times to one woman than a thousand women once.  It is not the carefree lazy days I miss.  I am retired and I have too many of those now.
     I miss the strength of my youth.  When I built my house I was working at the local cannery, the night shift,
twelves hours at a time.  I did that and built my house!  My last term in college I took 27 credit hours, that is like two full student's full of work AND I did those same hours at the cannery.  I got all "A's" and one "B"!
Oh I wasn't that smart.  By then I had realized that the professor's didn't really want you to learn anything, certainly not enough to get sidetracked on any issue.  I knew they just wanted me to spit it back at them and that is what I did.  There have been classes where I got "C's" where I had learned far more.  By my last term in college I just wanted to finish so I just did what was expected and got better grades for it.
     When I was young I could lift huge beams, just put them on my shoulder and walk up the ladder.  I have no strength like that now.  The strength of youth is replaced by wisdom but I am not sure it is a fair trade.
Wisdom comes with caution and a particular loss of adventure.  The horizon of life should be huge in your youth.  I have travelled a thousand miles with two dollars in my pocket.  I would go to Europe on a whim and like a rich man, stay for six months at a time.  No agenda, no itinerary, just an amble, pausing as I liked.

This is the little MG I crashed! I told that story yesterday.

    I was a virgin to everything, all was new and exciting and mysterious.  There weren't the evil drugs in those days and people were not so self destructive.  It seems that people were happier and friendlier and not so suspicious and cautious.  I bet I have hitch-hiked 100,000 miles in Europe, as far North as the reindeer go in Norway to the Southern areas of Italy and everywhere in between.  People were friendly and curious and would take you way out of their way and always feed you and offer a place to stay.  It was a time without suspicions.
My Other Blog is Here.

Garden Painting

There are no rules, no order to things,

nothing translated, nothing to say.

No loss of meaning, no meaning at all.

Not hindered by history

nor confinement of words

No unnecessary things.

Nothing to remember,

nothing that is lost.

No thing to be found.

Red because I like it and choose it

and want it to be. Green because you expect it in a garden

So it will always be there.

Black is what is missing and will never appear.

I don't have a style

No style at all. This is my second oil painting and it can be representative of whatever you like. Call it what you want to. I am discovering that this art painting stuff is a bit like poetry. I write 'em you read 'em and find your own meaning!

Modern Art is color-coordinated. Will it go with the couch? Do I need to repaint the walls? Can you make this in Blue?

Some where I once read that next year's popular colors are found in French underware this year!

I think I need to go to France and do some research on this.

I paint with the colors I have, ten of them, that's enough. I am limitted by my ability but not my vision. I know what I want to do, just don't quite know how to get there. In the mean time I am playing and this is the poetry I am doing today.

My Other Blog is HERE!