Moments

   Some moments in life are special, and we know they are going to be special before they happen. Many of these moments we can record in photographs or video recordings. It seems now, in this day and age, every moment can and possibly is being recorded. But some times we experience moments we don't know how special they are until they are passed. Or sometimes we experience a moment, but it just lives within us, until we suddenly waken to how special that moment is. Well, I do that when I paint many times. After a moment has passed, I try to capture it in paint on paper or canvas. I am going to post three paintings and explain the moment they represent to me. The first painting is entitled "city lights". You might wonder where that title comes from. This painting was painted, and I really related to it, but I didn't know for sure why, what was I painting and why did I relate to it so much. Eventually I realized what is was, it was from the memory of the first moment I came out of the hospital in St. Paul, MN after my son had survived his brain surgery. It wasn't the first night after the surgery, I don't even know if it was the second or third or fourth night. But it was around four or five at night, getting dark but not real dark. I was so tired I was seeing double and the lights and the buildings all just blended together. But when I painted this painting I didn't know what it was even after I finished. I knew it was a memory or thought inside of me, but wasn't sure which until it presented itself to me. When I realized what it was, I felt tears running down my cheeks. It felt so healing and joyful. I was amazed, I had painted this, but only later realized the moment I was painting. The next painting, is a painting I purposely and knowing painted from memory.

                                                                    City Lights


           This painting is entitled "Cranes on the Platte" or "Explosion", can't decide for sure. I have  painted some crane paintings, and even sold one or two. But none of the paintings expressed what my memory was of this day. The memory I was trying to express was a memory from when I was college age, and I had my first and basically only experience of watching the cranes leave the river.  The memory was like an explosion of the senses, the noise, the movement, even the smell of the water as hundreds if not thousands of cranes seemed to explode into the air. But I kept getting stuck painting the actual cranes, until I freed my mind up enough to just let movement and color  represent the cranes and their rise off the river. I knew I had succeeded for me, when I stepped back from this painting. This truly represented what I experienced that day.

                                                               Cranes on the Platte

      This final painting is entitled the "Outsiders".  Being a teacher I have always tried to be aware of my students, and their feelings and their lives. But sometimes, as a regular teacher, it becomes hard to keep a feel for the students. Expectations and behavior and all those variables affect the relationship and awareness. When I quit teaching full-time, and became a substitute teacher, I noticed that I became aware of another group of students, I hadn't really noticed before, and they were the outsiders. I sometimes wondered if these kids just immediately realized, even before I did, that as a substitute, whether I believed it or not, I was also an outsider. I developed relationships with these students, some of them, actually would seem happy to see me, when I would be subbing for their teacher. They seemed to open up to me, and talked freely about themselves. The thing that I thought interesting, and what I tried to capture in the painting, was the fact, that they would not open up to each other.  They sometimes would ask to come to the room during my free period. I would get an ok before I said yes, but my one rule was I would not be alone with a student, there had to always be more than one student. But when the kids would come, they would almost ignore each other, wouldn't look at each other, or really acknowledge each other, unless I tried to drag them into the conversation, and instead of having individual conversations with all of them, have a conservation they could all be a part of. It eventually became obvious to me, they preferred the individual conversations. It was almost as if I was invited into their individual worlds, but their peers were not . . .Those kids, the outsiders, were who I was trying to represent . . .painting from memory how their relationships seemed to me.

the outsiders