WHAT DOES IT MEAN?  It’s an important question that deserves attention, but sometimes insistence on knowing what something means gets so much in the way of experience that a moment which doesn’t depend at all on understanding for its significance slips past and away.  At the National Gallery a couple of weeks ago I wandered among familiar paintings and prints and sculptures without stopping to analyze anything I was seeing.  I specifically sought out works that I’ve known for years, the way one makes a special effort to find old friends. I didn’t try to figure out what Clifford Still or Robert Motherwell or Leonardo da Vinci was trying to say.  Without spoiling the experience by analyzing it, I stood and allowed myself to be amazed that anybody could do what artists do.  Please don’t misunderstand.  Just as surely as Michelangelo knew that he wanted to release David from that immense block of marble, Motherwell knew what he was doing and why he was doing it when he painted the thirty-foot-long Reconciliation Elegy that hangs in the East Wing of the National Gallery.

Looking for my picture for today, I wandered down by the river in Mission Valley.  The underside of the interstate highway bridge over the river is an immovable canvas for graffiti artists.  Some of them are simply taggers who, like Kilroy, want to say, “I was here.”  Others are artists who put their work up knowing it won’t last.  Someone else will eventually come along and paint over it.  I go down there every couple of months to see what’s new.  Today I found some things that I could photograph and then manipulate with Photoshop in my computer to get an image that belongs now to me.  It’s great fun.  I found some melaleuca roots that belonged once to a tree I like, but now they are mine... as well as the sycamore bark not far from the road where I found some gravel imbedded in black asphalt. Abstract expressionist images are out there waiting to be discovered, like Michelangelo’s David that was once hiding in the carrara marble.  

Life is good.

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