You can look at this canvas for half an hour and see little or nothing. Or you can surrender to it and see everything, and imagine even more. It depends on how hustled and harried you are, how busy, how important, how judgmental, how sure, how willing to be open or blind. What you do and what you see will be the result of your own vision and experience. It […]
Whatever I meant in that moment and mood, it seems blurred and faded now. The words sound nice. Maybe that’s why I was satisfied with them at the time. But I can’t say I’m satisfied with them now. The drawing, though, I like better. I can’t criticize someone for the way he looks. His expression seems the result of having lived many lives in one. Now I wonder: is that, […]
Though the canvas arrived five years after the poem, it was immediately obvious, to me, at least, that the two belong together. The message of both, if there is one, seems to be the same: be attentive; each day is a glory of its own. Survive. Live on. And if they bear no message, which is certainly possible, they still share the characteristics of weathered, well-lived poems. ~ [ 2016 […]
I love what I call shared faces — faces that blend and overlap in mutual understanding, compassion, and sympathy. I have drawn many such, without knowing how the first of them came about; it was, most definitely, not a matter of deliberation or intent. In other words, it just happened. And just as they exist in me, in the so-called “imaginary world,” they exist around me, in the so-called “real […]
It might be coincidence, and probably is; on the other hand, why would I have awakened from a dream this morning in which I was repeating the Japanese word kangai, of all things, when I, to the best of my memory and knowledge, have never encountered the word? “Strong feelings; deep emotion,” one definition says, which is mingled with a sense of “nostalgia or contemplation.” And now I look at […]
Here are three favorites from my fabled pencil-and-index-card period, in which, like a demented phrenologist, I traced and embraced the divots, pits, and grain, to reveal — what, exactly, is for you to decide. A starry night? An ocean of crows? A rider that makes his own road? Look again. Take your time. Each is revealing. Each is disturbed. Each contains great hypnotic power. Are you awake? Asleep? Here? There? […]
What they suffered, they suffered together. Material wealth was never their concern, their poverty being the inherited kind. Yet kindness is their inheritance. It’s been said that they died the same day, within hours of each other, their shared dream having run its course. There were children, one of whom, we are told, made these sketches of her parents when they were both very old, using a piece of charcoal […]
This thoughtful little canvas hangs on the wall near our old oak dining table. It’s been there for years, and I still study it often, half-expecting a change in expression. Someday, if it isn’t discarded, or ruined by water or fire, it will belong to someone — valued, perhaps, or politely kept in a drawer. In that way, its story might be seen as similar to our own. And so […]
and this is the world in the form of a map mountains are knuckles and nations are blotches of failed pigment and this is my skin and that is where rivers run * I really do forget the drawings, and the poems. I call this a blessing — to be surprised, upon finding them later, and to feel almost as if they were done by someone else, as, in a […]
I love this drawing, and its gentle simplicity. But I love what I said about drawing every bit as much, because it’s such an apt description of how I feel about art. The figure itself took a lifetime and about two minutes to make; or, to put it another way, it all happened in a breath. ~ [ 1980 ]
William Michaelian 