Friday Feature: For the Muses

This first stage of a painting was inspired by a photograph of the artist model, Audrey Munson.  The more I learn about her the more fascinated I am.  She worked as a model for sculptors in New York during the nineteen-teens and created four very classy nude films.  But alas alack! no copies of these films are available.  One film is in an archive in France but they aren't giving up the goods.  Numerous sculptures of Munson are peppered throughout New York City.  She inspired so many artists that she is considered the muse to top all muses.

 There's language in her eye, her cheek, her lip,

Nay, her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look out

At every joint and motive of her body.

-Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida

"To the pure, all things are pure." Audrey Munson

Thanks to all of the muses who inspire us. 

The Most Docile Earth

The Most Docile Earth
Copyright 2013 Addie Hirschten
Oil on Canvas
18" x 36"

Consider all this;
and then turn to the green, gentle, and most docile earth;
consider them both, the sea and the land;
and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself?
For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land,
so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti,
full of peace and joy,
but encompassed by all the horrors of the half-known life.

-Herman Melville
 

Wallflowers vs. Favorites

The Wallflower
Copyright 2013 Addie Hirschten
9" x 12"
Oil on Canvas

I am waiting for my case to come up

and I am waiting.

-Lawrence Ferlinghetti

The face for this painting was inspired by an old 19th century sketch I found entitled "The Favorite."  Something about that title rubbed me the wrong way.  Why do we have to have favorites?  Why can't we recognize the awesome qualities in everyone around us?  Then again we are drawn like a magnet to certain people.  (I am anyway.)  Maybe it is just pheromones?  There doesn't seem to be another logical explanation as to why some people turn your crank and others just don't.  

So... I made her a wallflower instead of a favorite.

That just seemed more humble or somesuch.

Then again-
we have all at one point been the wallflower and at other times the favorite.

And at other times you just want to rest- that is where I'm at now.

To everything there is a season.

Friday Feature: Elly MacKay

Upcoming artist Elly MacKay has just released her first book, If You Hold a Seed.  If you haven't seen it yet be prepared to be amazed.  It is illustrated using paper puppet sets reminiscent of Indonesian shadow theater in which lights illuminate the scene from behind.  MacKay's work has a fresh modern look that plays with layering in an innovative way unlike anything I have seen before.  

I am holding my breath for her to tackle the classic nursery tales and I have a feeling that the best is yet to come from this artist!

If you wait and wait...

Season by season, year by year...

That tree will grow so large 

it will hold you.

-Elly MacKay

The Work of the Soul

 The Work of the Soul
Copyright 2013 Addie Hirschten
Oil on Canvas
16" x 20"

There are two ways of spreading light; to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.

-Edith Wharton

This is the work of the soul- the work that all humans are meant to do.

To bring warm winds to cool places.

 Where there is darkness we bring light.

Saint Francis

Saint Francis
Copyright 2013 Addie Hirschten
Oil on Canvas
18" x 36"

Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace,

Where there is hatred, let me sow love;

Where there is injury, pardon;

Where there is doubt, faith;

Where there is despair, hope;

Where there is darkness, light;

Where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master,

grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled, as to console;

to be understood, as to understand;

to be loved, as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive.

It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,

and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.

-Prayer of Saint Francis

This painting depicts Saint Francis taming the wolf surrounded by birds.  I myself have been meditating lately on the first line of his prayer "make me an instrument of thy peace."   How can I better take action to create peace for those around me?  The most challenging part has been to create peace within my own thoughts...

To calm my fearful doubts and surrender to reality.
To be thankful for everything.
To absolve every transgression.
It is perfect just the way it is.

Friday Feature: Horace Pippin

Domino Players by Horace Pippin

Despite having wounded his right arm while serving in World War I Horace Pippin continued painting throughout his lifetime. I have to believe that he found much of the strength to continue working from his desire to express the injustice of segregation that he experienced. That and maybe he wanted to honor the quiet beauty of everyday existence... people gathering on a street, a family eating dinner. After the horrors of war and racism this is what he wanted to focus on.

by Horace Pippin

I did not care what or where I went. I asked God to help me, and he did so. And that is the way I came through that terrible and Hellish place. For the whole entire battlefield was hell, so it was no place for any human being to be.

-Horace Pippin

Pictures just come to my mind, and I tell my heart to go ahead. 

-Horace Pippin

Saint Patrick

Saint Patrick
Copyright 2013 Addie Hirschten
Oil on Canvas
9" x 12"

Let anyone laugh and taunt if he so wishes. 

I am not keeping silent, 

nor am I hiding the signs and wonders that were shown to me.

-Saint Patrick

Open

Open
Copyright 2013 Addie Hirschten
Oil on Canvas
20" x 30"

Be open to everything and attached to nothing.
-Tilopa

Love is always unconditional.  Reliance on someone else to fulfill your happiness is not love. Learn self-reliance and gain the ability to make yourself happy. If you are hunting for "love" with a long list of conditions you will never find it.

If someone wants to change you- they aren't expressing love.
If you want to change someone- you aren't expressing love.
Give without great expectations if you want to find the warmth of acceptance.

It is in giving that we receive.  It is in loving that we are loved...
-St. Francis

Fear holds more people back from love than anything else... fear of loneliness, fear of poverty, fear of judgments, fear of failure.  Years ago I talked to a woman who insisted she wouldn't date anyone who didn't have a credit card.  (So she could spend his money I guess.)  Possessive ownership is not love.  Marking someone as your territory with a ring, showing them off to the world, bragging... this is not love.  Let go of the security blanket of false promises.  Sometimes loving someone means letting them go to move on to their next phase of life.  Enjoy your lover's company now and give them the true acceptance, support and friendship you have been craving.  Let go of your materialistic expectations and give.

Give what you want to receive.  

Can you step back from you own mind and thus understand all things? 

Giving birth and nourishing,

having without possessing,

acting with no expectations,

leading and not trying to control

this is the supreme virtue.

-Lao Tzu

Friday Feature: Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson was a Transcendentalist Unitarian who has greatly influenced my own philosophical religious development.  His essay on Self-Reliance especially strikes a chord with me at this time...

These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs. 

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.

-Emerson

Yeah... I want to have strength stemming from only my own courage.

I want to only cultivate friendships with those who offer unconditional support.

I am only interested in truth, not the facade of society.

Success is...

-to laugh often and love much

-to appreciate beauty

-to find the best in others

-to give of one's self

-to leave the world a bit better

-to know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived
-Emerson

 

Youth

Youth
Copyright 2013 Addie Hirschten
Oil on Canvas
16" x 20"

What's to come is still unsure.

In delay there lies no plenty,

Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty,

Youth's a stuff will not endure.

-Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

(I feel like yelling, "YEAH! I'M NOT DEAD YET!")

Reincarnation Strikes Again

The Sum of All Things
Copyright 2013 Addie Hirschten
Oil on Canvas
18" x 36"

Nothing retains its form; new shapes from old.

 Nature, the great inventor, ceaselessly contrives. In all creation, be assured, there is no death – no death, but only change and innovation; what we men call birth is but a different new beginning; death is but to cease to be the same. Perhaps this may have moved to that, and that to this, yet still...

the sum of things remains the same.

-Ovid, Metamorphosis

Friday Feature: Maria Sibylla Merian

Butterfy Life Cycle by Maria Sibylla Merian

Somehow I had never heard of this amazing pioneering artist until recently.  Maria Sibylla Merian was a naturalist who specialized in entomology during the 17th century.  I love how she depicted the life cycle of insects so delicately... combining the plants eaten as well as the stages of metamorphosis.  She showed the constant flow of change all wrapped up into one picture.

Pomegranates by Maria Sibylla Merian

This week in a class I teach for the Indianapolis Art Center's ArtReach program, we studied the life of Merian then drew from real specimens.  The kids loved having dead insects, fish and even a dead bird to draw from!

One of my students drawing a butterfly specimen.  I am so proud!

Another one of my students drawing our dead bird.
(Fear not! He died of natural causes.)

The only constant is change.

-Heraclitus

You Wake Up

You Wake Up
Copyright 2013 Addie Hirschten
Oil on Canvas
20" x 30"

Later, you wake up beside your love,

the one who never had any conditions, 

the one who waited you out.  

-Eleanor Lerman, "Starfish"

An Easel

My New Easel

So despite having majored in art and spending years of my free time painting it was only a few weeks ago that I finally purchased an easel. I have been painting all of my canvases flat on the surface of a table. I don't know why I waited so long to get one. It felt like a guilty pleasure for some reason, a decadent waste of money.

Self-reliance is the theme of the week.

By a miracle of timing (and my kid being invited to two slumber parties) I was able to spend the weekend mediating by myself and figuring out what I want.
I am going to get better of taking care of myself.

Learn to cultivate your own garden.
-Voltaire

Friday Feature: William Blake

Songs of Innocence by William Blake

To see a world in a grain of sand,

and a Heaven in a wild flower,

hold infinity in the palm of your hand

and eternity in an hour.

-William Blake, Songs of Innocence

As with so many artists William Blake received little recognition in his own lifetime.  Perhaps that is due to the truism stated by Dr. Wayne Dyer that "Society has a tendency to honor its living conformists and its dead non-conformists." And Blake would have been a radical thinker even for our century. Some of his most intriguing ideas for me are his radical concepts on marriage and the roles of women. I agree with Blake that many marriages are little more than "legal prostitution" and that such agreements should be based on "sacred natural love" as opposed to duty.

And then there is the beauty of his mystical visions on the nature of spirituality...

He who desires but acts not breeds pestilence.

Everything that lives is holy, life delights in life.

I am in you and you in me.

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.

-Blake

Madonna and Child

Madonna and Child
Copyright 2013 Addie Hirschten
Oil on Canvas
16" x 20"

The mother and child reunion is only a motion away.

-Paul Simon

Take My Hand

Take My Hand
Copyright 2013 Addie Hirschten
Oil on Canvas
18" x 36"

Take my hand and lead me to salvation

Take my love for love is everlasting

To love another person is to see the face of God

-Kretzmer, Les Miserables

A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, 
bearing within him the image of a cathedral.
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry,The Little Prince

Friday Feature: Weird Al Yankovic

And now for something completely different...

just because

Life is too important to be taken seriously.
-Oscar Wilde

And this glorious song made me laugh so hard I cried.
Thank you Weird Al!

My Soul Can Reach

My Soul Can Reach
Copyright 2012 Addie Hirschten
Oil on Canvas
 18" x 36"

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height 

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight 

For the ends of being and ideal grace. 

I love thee to the level of every day's 

Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light. 

I love thee freely, as men strive for right. 

I love thee purely, as they turn from praise. 

I love thee with the passion put to use 

In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith. 

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose 

With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath, 

Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose, 

I shall but love thee better after death. 

-Elizabeth Barrett Browning

I can best describe *love* as this...

When I am with one of those few people I love I am a peace.  My restlessness ends.  I don't need to check my phone or pine for something else.  I feel complete.  I feel accepted.  Nothing is better than lifting them up those individuals.  Nothing is better than being in their arms.

I've realized that it doesn't matter how many Rembrandts I have,
how many Duesenbergs, 
if I don't have someone to share it with 
then I might as well be back in Liverpool broke.
-Daddy Warbucks

Happy Valentine's Day! 

Divorce

Divorce
Copyright 2009 Addie Hirschten
Pen and Pencil on Paper
9" x 12"

When I created the abstract scribbling above I was in the midst of a breakup.  The swelling form on the left is meant to depict my growing feelings of hope and passion.  The jagged line on the right was "the divide"... you know the part where "shields are up" and there is no meeting in the middle, there is no understanding, where you can't reach the other person no matter how hard you try to explain.  I remember wanting to scream "I want you to be happy too!  I always want what is best for you and this just isn't it.  If it's not working for me it can't possibly be working for you." The sun on the right represents the warmest part of that partner- the part that is him, the part that I love.

I dug up this picture this week because miraculously this partner has expressed that he finally understands all that I felt back then.  Not only understands it but he said, "I know now that you always had my best interests at heart... and I am so glad that you pushed me outside of my comfort zone."

I can't tell you how happy this makes me.  And none of this would have happened if I hadn't decided around that same time to be honest with everyone in my life.  It is as though by wading through all of this mucky yucky truth I have finally gotten to the center of the sun.  And it is a warm and wonderful place of acceptance.

I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality.  This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.

-Martin Luther King, Jr.

Suspension

Suspension
Copyright 2013 Addie Hirschten
Oil on Canvas
9" x 12"

It is now life and not art that requires a willing suspension of disbelief.

-Lionel Trilling

Compassion

Compassion
Copyright 2013 Addie Hirschten
Oil on Canvas
16" x 20"

Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries.

Without them humanity cannot survive.

-Dalai Lama

Friday Feature: Da Vinci

Virgin and Child with Saint Anne by Da Vinci

To be a renaissance man is to be a jack of all trades.  Leonardo da Vinci was a... painter, sculptor, architect, musician, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist, and writer.  And that is just what we know about.

Fetus by da Vinci

How well can we truly become an expert in any one thing without taking away from other skills?  Do these passions feed off of each other?  Sometimes I feel like I need to focus more.  Tally up those 10,000 hours.  Polish it until it shines. And...

Quality is better than quantity.
-Aesop

Then again da Vinci inspires me... 

his prolific work and her smile. 

Mona Lisa by da Vinci

I love to see you smiling.

The Reed Bed

The Reed Bed
Copyright 2013 Addie Hirschten
Oil on Canvas
16" x 20"

Since I was cut from the reed bed I have made this crying sound.

Anyone separated from someone he loves understands what I say:

Anyone pulled from a source longs to go back.

-Rumi

Rumi would say to stop searching outside myself, I know, I know...
my source is always there but I am human and I ache for this union with the divine lover that can pull me back to the reed bed. I ache to lie there. The warm water and my lover surrounding me as I surrounding him.

I could not exist, could not exist at all, unless you were in me.
-Saint Augustine

How the World May Be Changed

How the World May Be Changed
Copyright 2013 Addie Hirschten
Oil on Canvas
9" x 12"
Original available on Etsy

Had you been there tonight
You might know how it feels
To be struck to the bone
In a moment of breathless delight.
Had you been there tonight
You might also have known
How the world may be changed
In just one burst of light.
And what was right seems wrong
And what was wrong seems right.

-Herbert Kretzmer, Les Miserables

Friday Feature: Matisse

Christmas Eve 1952 by Matisse

Everyone is all aflutter here in Indianapolis due to the fact that our art museum, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, is going to host an exhibit of Matisse's works this coming fall!  We are going to have color and a splash of Fauvism. I am so stoked.

The Fall of Icarus by Matisse

In 1941 Matisse went through a surgery due to cancer.  After that he was confined to a wheelchair.  While this might have pushed him into a depressive funk instead he experienced a renewed vigor, "une seconde vie" a second life as he put it.  During that time he produced a new body of work made of paper cut outs.  This was the ultimate lemonade out of lemons situation.

Madame de Pompadour by Matisse

There are always flowers for those who want to see them.

-Henri Matisse

The Dance by Matisse

Lovely Patrons and Frames

Bounty of Roses
Copyright 2012 Addie Hirschten
Acrylic on Paper
8 1/2" x 12"
Sold from Etsy

A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.

-Benjamin Franklin 

I am so blessed to have such wonderful patrons to support my art.  This one recently sold from my Etsy store.  Once it arrived and was framed, the buyer updated me with this picture in its new home:

"Bounty of Roses" Painting in its new home!

It is so comforting to know that my babies have found good homes.
Many, many thanks!

Making the Dream Reality

Making the Dream Reality
Copyright 2013 Addie Hirschten
Oil on Canvas
16" x 20"
Original Available on Etsy

Everybody can be great...because anybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.

-Martin Luther King, Jr.
 
Below is a link to a lecture I recently gave on finding the universal in folklore...
how our we are united by our commonalities.
 http://www.uui.org/sermon/finding-the-universal-in-folklore/

Friday Feature: Michelangelo

Pieta Sculpture by Michelangelo

There are two interesting elements to the life and works of the artist Michelangelo that fascinate me. The first being how he identified himself as a sculptor and didn't care for painting yet he produced amazingly dynamic frescos.  The most famous of which is his work on the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican.

The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo

Note how sculptural Michelangelo's depictions of the human form are in the painting above.  The lesson I take away from this is how craftsmanship in any format can aid in the development of another.
And then there are the issues of loincloths...
Shortly after the Sistine Chapel was finished it was decided by the powers that be to have another artist paint loincloths over the genitals of the bodies of the ceiling frescos.  This action was influenced by the conservative movement of the Counter Reformation.  What irks me as always about such censorship is the idea that our bodies are crass.  I perceive sexuality as a divine energy responsible for our own creation, something to be celebrated with sacred reverence.  The paintings were recently restored to their original state of nude glory.  Rock on.

I feel as lit by fire a cold countenance

That burns me from afar and keeps itself ice-chill;

A strength I feel two shapely arms to fill

Which without motion moves balance.

The flesh now earth, and here my bones,

Bereft of handsome eyes, and air,

Still loyal are to him I joyed in bed,

Who I embraced, in whom my soul now lives

-Michelangelo's love poems to Tommaso dei Cavalieri