“Now I am all riled up reliving this experience”
Lol, well for what it’s worth I thought it was extremely well written and heartfelt.
A good example of why I read comments on this site
5 Likes
Just meant “scorched” or “barren”. Elliot’s surrounding being a very green and verdant one, we might forgive the analogy of cactus to things that are against life. One might choose a comparison that has no life at all, but he couldn’t have imagined what we’re living. His was a life-affirming world.
Thanks for the poetry.
4 Likes
My Raison D’être
This was a great podcast. Thank you. My raison d’être is to create beautiful things. Food, dresses, hats, spaces. I think in pictures.
I grew up in a fine art household. Everyone was creative. My mother was a painter, my father an engineer, oldest sister a classical pianist, next sister a sculptor, my brother a designer/inventor, then me…I started to make toys/games that my parents wouldn’t buy for me.
Since I was quite a few years younger than my siblings, I went a lot of places with my mom. This meant I got an incredible art education outside of the school system. She taught art classes to senior citizens and took master classes from great artists. When teaching life drawing, I was the model. If they were drawing a still life, I would sit under the table, hidden by a table cloth and listen to her help the students draw the plastic apples and grapes carefully arranged with a pitcher, plate, cups…
I would come home from school, beginning at age 5, and sit in the special chair in her studio. This is where you sat and looked at the work in progress. We would discuss her work for the day, which included art lessons; line shape, form, color, contrast, perspective. I did this until I moved out of the house at 18.
She showed her paintings all over NYC and Long Island. The Greenwich Village outdoor art show and the West Hampton Art Show (Jackson Pollack’s shows) were events that shaped me. I was that kid selling my little creations on a cardboard box in a remote corner of her space. Soho art galleries in the 1970’s, uptown private gallery shows. We were always packing paintings in the car, hanging paintings, critiquing, analyzing. My mom was sought after. She declined. She said she would not paint on demand for someone else’s ideas.
I sold my 1st creation when I was nine years old. My dad and I made Jacob’s ladders (a wooden toy). I wanted to be a dressmaker, but wasn’t allowed to learn to sew. My parents families in the early 1900’s were sweat shop workers and factory workers. My grandmother was an industrial sewing machine threader at 5 years old. When she was 16 her dream was to work at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, but it burned down.
I took extra art classes in high school. When I wanted to go to BOCES, which is NYS’s vocational school, I was not allowed. The “guidance counselors” told my parents I was too smart for that and besides, I was a girl. I couldn’t do auto body design or carpentry. Girls do cooking at home.
I almost forget that I played the flute and was supposed to go to Juliard, except I wasn’t a good musician. I took private lessons and practiced a lot, but it didn’t turn me into a flutist worthy of a career. When it came time to go to college, I wanted to study art, but again, I was too smart for that AND my art was commercial art. Not something to go to art school for. I am laughing at how stupid this sounds now, as I write this.
As I learned to cook, starting at the age of 10, right away, I became a vertan, when I burned myself and still went to the movies, with a pat of butter in a plastic baggie to put on the blister. I became a pie maker, and my specialty in high school was quiche. My father wanted me to sell them to grocery stores. Let’s open a factory, he said0. When I said I’d have to quit school, he went blank.
When I got to college, one of the 1st things a professor said to me is, “What are you doing here? You’re an entrepreneur.” I asked, “What is that?” I got no answer. I studied literature and creative writing. I liked to read the classics and write. They tried to steer me into accounting and finally into teaching. What a joke. I should have walked out, but everyone “important” convinced me to graduate. I paid for my education by making jewelry and ceramic pie beads that I sold at craft shows and rock and roll concerts.
After college, my jewelry won awards in museum art shows. 15 years ago I found my artist medium when I met felt makers. I finally have a great art studio and natural dye studio. I did dye one piece of fabric with the dye flowers I grew and made a dress this year. My mom wanted to see it. I said I would wear it on my next visit. She passed the day after I said that.
The point of telling you all of this is that I wasn’t stopped. The delays and roadblocks sometimes make me angry. I have done all of the creative things that the powers that be tried to prevent me from doing, plus a whole lot more. I designed my house and put together a team to build it. Andy and I were the GC’s and worked with an architect and lead carpenter. I designed the logo for my business with 2 other people, created all of the recipes for the products we make. I sell soap outside (at our farmers market). 49 years later I am still selling what I make outside. Every once in a while I take a break and create a body of art, which I show and sell.
Since this whole WEF attempted takeover of the free people, I haven’t had much time for art. It’s the 1st thing they take away. No beauty for you. My finger is pointing at you. It’s funny to read about the modern art museums full of garbage. Good art can be made out of garbage, but modern art has been turned into a heap of stuff with no design or meaning to search out. The meaning is easy to see and clear. Many people are surrounded by UGLY, and that’s what they are expressing. Good art makes the onlooker think and feel. It’s a sad state of affairs when all that’s being brought up at this point in history is bad feelings, mockery, and sadness.
Beauty is something to be enjoyed every day. You must find it and make time for it. It’s the opposite of what’s happening to our civilization.
4 Likes
In the words of Kandinsky: “Art is not vague production, transitory and isolated, but a power which must be directed to the improvement and refinement of the human soul — to, in fact, the raising of the spiritual triangle.
If art refrains from doing this work, a chasm remains unbridged, for no other power can take the place of art in this activity. And at times when the human soul is gaining greater strength, art will also grow in power, for the two are inextricably connected and complementary one to the other. Conversely, at those times when the soul tends to be choked by material disbelief, art becomes purposeless and talk is heard that art exists for art’s sake alone…
It is very important for the artist to gauge his position aright, to realize that he has a duty to his art and to himself, that he is not king of the castle but rather a servant of a nobler purpose. He must search deeply into his own soul, develop and tend it, so that his art has something to clothe, and does not remain a glove without a hand. The artist must have something to say, for mastery over form is not his goal but rather the adapting of form to its inner meaning.”
Kandinsky was a student of Annie Bessant and Rudolf Steiner, a theosophist and spiritualist who believed in the strengthening and development of the human spirit as an individual pursuit and necessary discipline. He was also a synesthete. I can feel the harmony and spiritual quality created by the colors and shapes in his work. He had a concept of human spiritual evolution which included creative individuals having an “Avant guard” function in the culture of their time, meaning they had perception and experience from beyond the view of most people in their culture which they could communicate to their culture as a kind of spiritual food and help it evolve. Avant guard came from the French military term for the ones who scouted for information behind enemy lines and then returned and reported back.
To me, having a background in studying art history and philosophy, and appreciating this for two intense years as a fine arts major, MOMA was an amazing experience. To see those grand paintings in their full size and color rather than small posters or in books, the power was so present. I love Russeau, O’Keefe, the impressionists. I feel the need to express that appreciation is sometimes a product of in-depth study which is not immediately available to those not interested or primed for the experience - as a response to some of the more negative commentary about MOMA etc above. On the other hand, going to the Guggenheim I was utterly at a loss - the most interesting thing in the room for me was the fancy machine that monitored the temperature and humidity. So I agree that lacking the inspirational spiritual food aspect described by Kandinsky so well, yes art can be as he puts is “choked by material disbelief” and an expression of cultural degradation. It was a pleasure to hear you converse with an artist who has recognized the degradation and is following his passion!
2 Likes
Kandinsky on the Spiritual Element in Art and the Three Responsibilities of Artists – The Marginalian
Kandinsky’s Thought Forms and the Occult Roots of Modern Art - Theosophical Society in America
3 Likes
thanks I enjoyed it!
Yeah, pretty much spot-on. Also he was on Prof CJ’s Dangerous History podcast, discussing the NY acting and Hollywood scenes, and the hits his career has taken from the covid and woke plagues: https://profcj.org/ep245/
LOL great one!
LOL- Mike you’re on a roll!
I see it now, not sure why it was blank before.
Oh, I don’t know. I don’t think there’s been any decline in the quality of art. I’ll prove my point:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Swing_(Fragonard)
https://www.masterworks.com/research/artist/jean-michel-basquiat/artwork/untitled-1982-w:0e5729ceb23978c
Someone paid $1.2M for this…
2 Likes
This was a great interview - thanks, Chris, for introducing me to Clifton Duncan. I’ve searched him out on his own podcast and as a guest on others since then.
There’s an especially good one called “The New York Mandate Podcast” hosted by Aimee. She also has a substack called “No One You Know”. Each guest is someone whose life is or was affected by the mandates. Clifton Duncan is the guest on Epidode 22. It’s just over 2 1/2 hours long but a great listen. He has such a calm and elegant voice and demeanor and a way of explaining his viewpoint that makes it very understandable without going over the top. Might be a good one for that friend or family member who needs red-pilling.
1 Like
Psychosocially Humans Have Been Here Before
In the physical sense of populations well beyond carrying capacity OVER THE ENTIRE EARTH with no place to migrate, yes physically humans have not been here before. Modern tech means nobody anywhere can isolate from the effects AND the contagions, both physical and psychological, spread nearly instantly.
Our current outbreaks of mass psychoses are no longer confined to a geographic area like Germany, or the Middle East, or China or USSR. Woke psychosis has overrun two continents. Now, though there is an equally powerful back to a
non-existent-past psychosis (MAGA Brexit) with nothing to offer but hate of Woke identity politics. AND rabid Islamic fundamentalism spreads psychotic intolerance from the middle east to SE Asia, with the “migrants” they export bringing a third mass psychosis to Europe.
In the physical realm, though, societies have faced such extinction events before; they were just local AND migration saved remnant populations from the results of their own folly. Think about the plight of Native Americans when they had killed the last of the NA megafauna or when the Anastasi had turned their lush valleys into a desert. We don’t have much of a record of the ecosystem
collapses that humans caused in prehistoric Africa, but we know that migration
occurred and we assume, I think correctly, that it was because early bands
destroyed their local ecosystems and were forced to die or leave the only
“world” they ever knew. Civilization collapses are the norm. Particularly where they came with ecological collapse, people must have experienced the same fears we experience today. Plague, drought, famine: where could they go to be safe? And often their homes were overrun by people fleeing worse conditions elsewhere – “migrants”, refugees, barbarian hoards.
Civilizations HAVE been here before. The difference is the danger is global and there is no place to migrate. Every nook and cranny is already overpopulated. Californians sell their overpriced houses and buy in Austin (TX) so now Austin has all the same problems - lack of water, overpriced housing. . . The modern barbarian hoards (refugees from middle east conflict or Silicon Valley economic collapse) must overrun places that already have happy people going about their business. Are the locals wrong in pushing back?
Yes, the danger is now global. Climate instability is now global, not just a local
drought brought on by overgrazing, lack of soil management and improper water management. The contagions spread not just across continents, but across oceans. However, psychologically, civilization collapse through overpopulation and political mismanagement has been a defining characteristic of all human civilizations. Just remember the Easter Island mass psychosis that destroyed their “world” if you doubt the power of a shared toxic narrative to turn brains to mush. I’m sure they had a Chris who told them to cut it out. As with religious mass psychoses, the devout destroyed the “Cassandras”. I suppose we should be grateful they’re only cancelling us and taking our jobs. They could be sending us to a re-education camp (oh, wait that’s the new college experience). Oh well, at least they’re no longer burning us at the stake.
We need better myths.
8 Likes
I’ve done some treks through the Baja California, Mexican wilderness, beyond the reaches of cattle, and the desert is a beautiful place full of life.
1 Like
This art and your comment made me laugh. I’d rather have the velvet wall-hanging of dogs playing poker than either of these.
Inspiring life history, Wendy! Frustrating and confusing to live through too, I imagine. My partner wanted to go to trade school after high school, but was told she had to go to college. Now she’s a highly skilled carpenter after many years of trying to be something she wasn’t.
Absolutely !
While I did all the normal and expected stuff way back then, like getting a Bachelor’s Degree, working in a TV shop in the afternoons, loading the massive Hobart Industrial Dishwasher each night at supper when working a 2nd job at the Dining Hall, and later going to get a Master’s Degree at the company’s expense, I never forgot my roots.
And when I helped start a company, I hired in a guy who didn’t even get through high school - but he was smart as a damn whip, and I could see it instantly the moment I first met him.
As many of us will likely tell you, most of what I learned was after I got out into the real world, and much of what I was taught in college I had to un-learn.
When I did my software stuff, and my circuit designs, my mental attitude about them was that I was creating Works of Art, rather than things that were simply “useful.” My approach served me very well.
There is Art in Science, and there is Science in Art.
And no need for them to get a divorce from each other.
Just ask Da Vinci.
– Chuck
1 Like
I must confess, it was the Girls’ Dining Hall, but what made it so worthwhile was that I actually got paid $1.25 / hour for four hours of chatting up the Young Ladies as they put their trays on the conveyor belt towards the Hobart. Life was simpler then …
… but, I digress.
1 Like