Blog

I figured I’d wait until the Ides of March passed and the luck of the Irish filled the air before sidling up to my computer to look for answers, or questions. I don’t know about you, but I can get lost in time and space with this endeavor. You try this, discard that, assemble another connection, search for an opening, and ignite the flame.

I love to find a line of poetry, a verse, a song that distills an idea, provokes, inspires. Poets know the secret of the appeal to our senses. By the power of figurative language, Hughes gifts the reader in this poem with an image that haunts and taunts, delivering the essence of the thought.  Read More »

Yes true, January slipped by without a post. But rather than make perky New Year’s resolutions in haste for 2015, I decided on a different course.

Suspended in time across oceans and continents, I log over 20,000 air miles on a flight to freedom. In search of fresh perspective I gaze at changing cloud formations as day merges into night with accelerated speed. During stretches of turbulence images sharpen and priorities reshuffle. Winter storms lose their bite and the heat of South Africa’s summer comes out to play. Read More »

As we celebrate the holidays I wonder about wonder. And dazzle. About joy of the unexpected, of achievement, discovery, the mysteries of nature, chance, the uncanny, the ineffable, the excitement of the strange, the unfamiliar, the allure of a thinly veiled secret. In my current exhibition at JWA (www.marthafullerartist.com) I culled through thousands of photographs taken in Africa and the Caribbean to reveal a deeper understanding of these experiences. Always on a quest to discover, my curiosity draws me to quirky sightings, chance encounters, and fleeting moments that endure. By some inexplicable magic that occurs when I synthesize images, I uncovered what now seems clear. Truth and beauty lie in the fusion of illusion and reality. That makes me wonder about the wonder of creativity.  Read More »

In this November sequel, I’ve swapped October’s magic tricks and black hat for ironic new connections and a fur (or faux) chapeau. A crown of thorns adorns Willem Dafoe. And now that Tom Petty and I have already celebrated birthdays, I would like to feature two November born artists: Canadian writer Margaret Atwood and American film director Martin Scorsese.

A few days before Thanksgiving 2011, a Dutchman came to stay who would bestow a number of gifts upon me. After flying 5,500 miles across the Atlantic he landed at LAX. As we neared my house he asked to stop to pick up a few things and emerged from the Newport Beach store with a bouquet of yellow tulips. That would be like Margaret Atwood flying from Ontario or Quebec to Florida to buy maple syrup in a Miami super market. Still cool though – the tulips, beautiful and spring like – full of promise. A pivotal moment in a true story that could just as easily be fiction.

To clarify…a plot is a series of events that entice the reader to find out what happens next. But a plot is not a story, just as a story is not a plot. The story is what you make of the plot. And for that you have to let it evolve… Read More »

Just before midnight two weeks ago Friday (24 hours before) I lucked into a ticket to see Tom Petty on the final night of his North American Hypnotic Eye Tour. Awesome evening of rock n’ roll! Maybe because I discovered Tom Petty has an October birthday too, I began to inventory birthdays (mine and those of pivotal people in my life) as well as unexpected moments, deaths of loved ones, reunions, anniversaries, and magic in this 10th month of the year. Read More »

Change your ways – change your days (and nights). On the eve of the September 23 equinox when the number of hours of daylight and darkness are exactly the same (12 hours), we witness the perfect hand off of partners in an elegant dance. The equinox (Latin aequi for equal and nox for night) occurs the moment the Sun crosses the celestial equator – the imaginary line in the sky above the Earth’s equator – from north to south. From then on the days become shorter, the nights longer.
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In the stillness of this hot August night, I indulge in one of my beloved art forms – from the Latin contemplari, a place of observation.

Nature knows when to unleash its fury, when to pull back, when to burst forth with new life, and when to lie fallow. Animals sense to survive, but we humans programmed to pursue every facet of daily existence have distanced ourselves from this rhythm. In our wiry wisdom we have lost touch with the power of the pure, the divine and the creative spirit.  Read More »

You should never make things up with the intent to deceive, but you could/should make it up to reveal the truth. Two writers we will never forget Nadine Gordimer 1923 – 2014 and Gabriel Garcia Marquez 1927 – 2014 died this year. Both recipients of the Nobel Prize for Literature (Gordimer 1991 – Marquez 1982) they showed us truth in many incarnations. The truth of why we write, of what we write, and how we write it. A grateful recipient of epiphany, Gordimer’s courage and insight showed me the essence of truth. Marquez’s imagination and fingerprints taught me about choice. Through the fictional worlds they create we can more closely align ourselves with reality.  Read More »

The word quell floated into my consciousness a few weeks ago. I had no idea what it wanted from me. I envisioned the fury of a storm at sea. Over the next several days quell kept surfacing, until one night a figure standing on the edge of a quay, with back turned, emerged through the mist. Ah, the French Lieutenant’s woman, I thought. Where did that come from? The past? The present? Life as film?

In his “Notes on an Unfinished Novel” John Fowles chronicles the genesis of his 467 page work of fiction, The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Four or five months before he began, a visual image rose in his mind one morning when he was half asleep – “a woman stands at the end of an ancient quay and stares out to sea. An outcast.” He didn’t know her crime, but the image kept recurring until he began to fall in love with her.  Read More »

Over and over I hear the dilemmas of the creative process i.e. a game of chance. As a true Libran I have flogged the arguments to do or not to do without mercy. With the back up of an Ancient Chinese philosopher/poet, an Irish rocker/philanthropist, an Italian renaissance painter/inventor, an English playwright, a Canadian journalist, an American political activist, a Spanish painter/sculptor, an English painter/poet, a Roman Catholic Saint/Spanish mystic, and an American writer/mountaineer, I offer a menu of 7 dilemmas with paradoxical mantras to attempt to unlock the paralyzing questions.  Read More »