January 15, 2012

Powder of snow, and that gleam over snow in the city that makes you think it’s dawn, but it isn’t.

Excellent painting yesterday. Textured several canvases with gel medium. I took to the framers the painting “Homeward,” which is the latest, probably the last, form taken by the big hunk of plywood I bought to use as the sidewalk sign for Urthona Gallery in 1993. It had the sign on it, then sat in storage after I closed the various galleries, then was painted in bright abstract patterns on sand for the wall at Avenue M, but the hanging apparatus on the back couldn’t hold up under the weight, and broke. It sat in the studio until I conceived the idea of Rough Beasts. I redid the underpainting in neutrals, and then painted over it a little owl flying home at first of morning over a fairy tale landscape. Took it to the framers so it would hang this time. Five or six lives under that lonely little owl. I suppose I should type all this up for a prospective buyer.

Forgot until I saw the mess on the piano, but I wrote a song yesterday morning, to one of my own poems, to be accompanied by either concertina or harmonium. Used to write music a lot, but got embarrassed being around real musicians who could talk of chord spelling and augmented this and diminished that, and so hid it away, and lost the computer that had the staff-writing program. Bought that anew, thinking I shouldn’t be the only one on earth prevented by incompetence from doing what he wants to do. Look at all those Presidential candidates. Taking a fresh look at the libretto I wrote for Frank for the Jonathan opera (it’s exciting) made me hot to take up the quill again. “I can do this,” I thought, whether I can or not.