Art is a Line

Gustav Klimt said that Art is a line around your thoughts. This blog is my attempt to tell the world how art has encircled my mind AND heart. These are my creative writings inspired by the works of artists that I think are important and beautiful and transcendent.

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[tauchner-deactivated20260222]

Shepard Fairey

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The cold choir of the endless white waves ignores the monster on its side. The sand wrestles with the saltwater to become a brown sludge that holds him on the shoreline. She has made him. He is painted into the middle of the canvas with only one witness other than us who watch him living or dying or breathing or not. The particles of his beard stretch longer than a sunset underneath him.

The mouth of the sky kisses the lips of the earth. We are productive. We point. We gather. We crouch. The cool cold air rustles through the long grass. And the black patches of paint creep through the skin of the planet. Are they anxious? Are they worried? Should we be worried? Is she worried that she makes this thing? This work of art. This endless plane. This flatness. This exhausting search for danger.

There is stillness in the underground, and the beast has not yet traveled. And so we are safe to cross over. And we are hidden in our protective skin. And we are here for every reason and no reason. And the texture of the air is stale but it is cool and it is wet, but it is a wetness that is old. It is wetness that has been trapped down here for as long as people need to travel. And these tracks take us everywhere and nowhere. And she will not bring the train. They will ignore fear because the train is not coming. Not in this painting. Not today.

Human beings are here even though they are not. You can see the remnants. You can see the things they have left behind. The basket is old. And you know that the space is old. And the people who live here are even older. Outside of the window is the lie of light. It is the fog of disembodiment. It is the gray inner coat of vital organs. And we are trapped inside trying to stay alive. And sooner or later we will be here to do the work. The ancient work. The work that she has left for us. And we will find the work in the browns and the tans and in the bruised blues of the implements that she has left for us. And we will do the work. We will do the work. We will do the work again.

There is the side and the other side. And the other side is multiplied. And there are not more than three. And between us is the frozen river. The frozen, unfrozen river… because it is not cold enough or still enough or strong enough to bring us together. And yet being apart is exactly what we want. And she has put us on each side. And there is danger. There is the chance that someone might be hurt. There is the chance that someone might hurt someone else. Because we are already hurt. We are already feeling the pain of the gray blue that falls on us. There is no snow but the sky is still falling. You can see it behind us. You can see it around us. This is the saddest state. The saddest country. In the middle of the saddest season. And we ignore the sadness. But we group tightly to the weapons of our own gray blue sadness.

She breaks the winter with a sky that could make anyone smile, and yet here we are in the corruptible dead shell of our bodies. A body that once housed the bodies of the happy, but now it is a body that is diseased. It is a body that has been touched by all of the danger of nature. And she is angry. She is frightened. And she holds her fear up to her eye. And as lovely as she looks in her dress, she is not aware of her loveliness. Because this is the endless plane. This is the country that is so flat and so cold even in the spring. Even under the teardrop blue sky. This is the country where violence can easily happen daily.

Once we could escape. Once people did. Once they traveled from one end of the earth to the other. And then back. And then back and back and back and forth. Until travel was no longer possible. Until escape was just someone's memory. Someone who no longer exists. And now we stare at the hulk. We stare at the Leviathan. We stare at the monster like a dead whale on the edge of the ocean. And we see it's black tarnished blood streaming from underneath it like a shadow or gunpowder. Because this is also a weapon. This is something that could have killed. It might have killed. And it still could kill. And we sit on the edge of winter and we cry and we howl and we mew. And we wait for a winter to run away and possibly crush us under the weight of the cabin.

Nature has made it inconvenient and yet still we have found a way to collide through her and find the golden glowing palace of convenience. She makes us this way. She wakes up and she sees us from a dream that she had that might have made her happy and yet as she stares into her mind, the dream becomes this wintry nightmare. And while her children are off at school, her mind is left to explore the sorrow of our home. The collective sorrow of the people who live here in her home. And she is able to feel it. She can feel it in the colors that she uses to create this oasis. And they are parked. And they are stalking. And they are shopping for the things that they think they need. When the things that they truly need are lost and embedded in their frozen and broken dreams.