The Story: Mind

A mind does not sit still long enough to be painted, so the painting gives it a shape it can bear. A triangle. A peak. A working form, blue on one face and fire on the other, joined where the thinking is hardest.

Watching my mind pose. Not mastering it. Watching it. The first courtesy of a long life is to stop pretending the mind is a servant and admit it is a companion with weather of its own. It poses the way a figure poses: turned, braced, a little theatrical, and then suddenly true. Observe and resolve problems. The line is plain because the work is plain. Look. Name the knot. Loosen it. Go on.

Working for survival, so life might carry on. The triangle is not decoration. It is load-bearing. Blue for the cool labor of seeing. Orange for the heat that keeps a person moving when the day has no applause in it. Under the peak the paint breaks, drips, and refuses to tidy itself. Survival is rarely tidy. It is pigment finding the floor and still holding the structure above.

Setting the imagination and goals in motion. The right-hand field is almost empty, and that emptiness is the page where motion begins. A goal is not a louder wish. It is a direction given to color. The triangle leans as if it has already decided to travel. The horizon line under it is thin, a ruled life, and the drips cross it anyway. Imagination does not ask the line for permission.

Then the storehouse. My storehouse of memories and colorful paintings. This is the quiet boast of the work, and it is allowed. A mind that has lasted keeps rooms. In those rooms are faces, winters, promises, and the paintings that remembered what the days forgot. The triangle is the door standing open. What spills from it is not waste. It is evidence.

Mind is a Painted Poem about the instrument that makes the poems. It does not flatter the instrument. It puts it to work: pose, observe, resolve, survive, imagine, remember. The colors are the proof that the work was not only endured. It was seen.

Collection:  Architecture of Stillness