GC Myers- RedTree

Eyvind Earle- Santa Ynez Memory (1998) Then very slowly I go to slightly lighter colors until little by little, the forms begin to take shape and I start to see what is happening. Since I never plan in advance, I simply let myself be led by instinct, taste and intuition. And it is in this manner that I find myself creating visions that I have never before imagined. And little by little certain…

Exiles: Cain 1995 From the moment that man believes neither in God nor in immortal life, he becomes ‘responsible for everything alive, for everything that, born of suffering, is condemned to suffer from life.’ It is he, and he alone, who must discover law and order. Then the time of exile begins, the endless search for justification, the aimless nostalgia, the most painful, the most heartbreaking…

Time Reverberation— At the Gmeiner Art Center— Show Ends Today! Imagination, as opposed to fantasy, is the ability to see the other thing, what one might call, to use those old-fashioned words, nature, reality, the world… Imagination is a kind of freedom, a renewed ability to perceive and express the truth. –Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature…

Clear Voice–At Gmeiner Art Center– Shows Ends Sunday Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours. ~Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf (1927) Very tired this morning. Yesterday was a busy day out of the studio and by late afternoon I was wiped out. This…

Eye to Eye— Now at Principle Gallery When I have been hungry or scared or broke, I called on my friends—agents of the Lord, you might say—and I received from them food and drink, comfort and kindness, money or a bed to sleep in for a time. I would have discarded—as you should also—anyone who heard a plea from a friend or a fellow human and offered only a prayer. We are, as Martha Graham always…

Studio 5:30 PM August 5, 2026   Every moment instructs, and every object; for wisdom is infused into every form. It has been poured into us as blood; it convulsed us as pain; it slid into us as pleasure; it enveloped us in dull, melancholy days, or in days of cheerful labor; we did not guess its essence until after long time. –Ralph Waldo Emerson, essay Nature (1836) I put what I believe are…

I do what I can to convey what I experience before nature and most often, in order to succeed in conveying what I feel, I totally forget the most elementary rules of painting, if they exist that is.  In short, I allow faults to appear, the better to fix my sensations. –Claude Monet, 1912 Much of what is below was first posted here back in 2012, I’ve shared it several time over the intervening…

Pondering Solitude— Now at the Gmeiner Life is painful. It has thorns, like the stem of a rose. Culture and art are the roses that bloom on the stem. The flower is yourself, your humanity. Art is the liberation of the humanity inside yourself. ― Daisaku Ikeda (1928-2023), Discussions on Youth (1999) The other day I wrote about how art creates the artist, how the artist’s being is ultimately…

To seek visions, to dream dreams, is essential, and it is also essential to try new ways of living, to make room for serious experimentation, to respect the effort even where it fails. –Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976) In some of my very earliest attempts at painting I used photo references, something I never use now. The photo that these two early…

RedTree: Continuum– At West End Gallery Every creative person is a duality or a synthesis of contradictory aptitudes. On the one side he is a human being with a personal life, while on the other side he is an impersonal, creative process… Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends,…

Echoes of Time- At West End Gallery People are always talking about originality; but what do they mean? As soon as we are born, the world begins to work upon us; and this goes on to the end. And after all, what can we call our own, except energy, strength, and will? If I could give an account of all that I owe to great predecessors and contemporaries, there would be but a small balance in my…

  The Answering Light— At West End Gallery, Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous to be understood. How grass can be nourishing in the mouths of the lambs. How rivers and stones are forever in allegiance with gravity while we ourselves dream of rising. How two hands touch and the bonds will never be broken. How people come, from delight or the scars of damage, to the comfort of a…

Galvanic Memory (2002)– At Principle Gallery Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time. –Thomas Carlyle, essay Sir Walter Scott (1838) This painting, Galvanic Memory, is as its title infers is primarily concerned with those memories that burn themselves deep into our psyches. But for me, it also…

Anchor– At West End Gallery The moment when, after many years of hard work and a long voyage you stand in the centre of your room, house, half-acre, square mile, island, country, knowing at last how you got there, and say, I own this, is the same moment when the trees unloose their soft arms from around you, the birds take back their language, the cliffs fissure and collapse, the air moves back…

As for omens, there is no such thing as an omen. Destiny does not send us heralds. She is too wise or too cruel for that. –Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) Going through old work there are plenty of these small paintings that I just shuffle past quickly without giving them much consideration. They often are half-baked attempts or simply flawed or, worst of all, just plain boring.…

Studio Window 5:45 AM July 27 2026 Smiling with pleasure, they went through their memories, not sad, old people’s memories, but poetic, youthful ones, those impressions from the very distant past where dream merges with reality, and they laughed softly, rejoicing at something. –Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (1867) I looked out the window of the studio this morning around 5:40 AM. The light was just…

A poem should not mean But be. — Archibald MacLeish, Ars Poetica (1926) These are well known last lines of the 1926 poem Ars Poetica from Archibald MacLeish. The poem asks us to experience poetry as a sensory experience. To just take it in as it is, to trust our visceral reaction to it. To not lose the poem in a fog of intellectualization as we grasp for meaning. That is very much like…