Keirartworks's Blog

Time teaches that there’s more to this story we’re in now than ‘broken heart’.

So many other hearts are broken, badly and beyond repair, in this world, across religion, family, geography, faith and belief, music and art, that there’s no room now for any one person’s ache and wrong. We are in an ocean of ache, still buoyant on the impossibly, miraculously resilient raft of human love and ridiculousness.

I write here to fully claim my personal online voice that emerged almost a decade ago to release the pressure from the daily relational muzzle I’d learned to wear. To accept full responsibility for the effects of the choices I made in response or reaction to events, traumas and pressures in my life. All of what I’ve written has affected people in ways I cannot know – I hope positively, but I cannot know.

I was harnessed by both the impossibly restrictive muzzle, and the resulting survival-need to release internal pressure, from age zero. Thankfully I was given art, not guns, as tools.

Oh, Christchurch New Zealand. Oh world.

This is the blog and the time that requires me to be wide open, fully responsible for my choices and the effect they have had on the people I have held close in my life, as well as the people I affect without even knowing. My choice, my works, my notes and paint – all of it.

I’m no victim.

In the final estimation, I believe those affected by gun violence aren’t, either. Nor do I believe that the shooters can claim immunity from inflicting pain, because they themselves are in pain. I, too, choose to make change with the tools I have learned to use, learned from pain, and thankfully, also love. So, I am also a perpetrator, since I choose action.

We are both victim and perpetrator, all of us. We all inflict pain and damage; we also heal. We all have the capacity to choose something larger, something generous, something warm and impossibly, miraculously resilient.

It’s NOT a cliche, it’s conscious action:  soft, gentle, firm, tender, shaking, shuddering love. You choose to risk your heart, and you DO this.

Difficult things matter. They are never, ever easy, but they matter.

Please – we need to learn how to go where it’s not comfortable to see ourselves reflected, to handle this drowning extremist wo/man in their panic, all of us – well before they open fire. They are us. We are we.

I don’t know what to do, here in the second day of my apartment with next to no furniture, with too much work to do in too short a time, my heart all in yearning for peace, for integrity and connection and miractulous human impossibility.

I’m sorry, human and non-human world, that we can be so harmful to one another. Please, please. Let’s find another way to be here together.

It seems to go like this: three or four intense 12-hour days working with huge wave of images connections paint insight epiphany, then a long day – like today – of disorientation.

I think the undertow is strong. It feels like being pulled backwards, so I can go over things again, integrate what they mean. This way, if someone asks me, I’ll be able to articulate what’s at play.

Feels like a dance.

Roaring like a Snowdragon lady out there since first light, later spitting hard rain on a sharp east wind, splatter on the window louder than the beeping of backing-up-trucks next door. Shoes not boots so wet socks for the first hour. Printer pooched mid-page while working on a reference photo I need to draw from. Two hours cajoling him according to online hp instructions then a trip through foot-high road slush to get a new printer, since apparently five human years is 120 in printer time, and old faithful is not worth another $80 for a new print head.

Another hour or so of tech-drain before I get a good reference print out of New Printer, by which time my reference point has migrated into the recycling bin, as they do when they’re not caught and used immediately.

Drawing board now but my heart’s not in it. I’m tech-tired and caught in a small, humbling moment of grief: I loved that old printer. We lived through a lot together; he printed many many cello choir parts, many journal articles (2-sided), without complaint.

I look at the painting I thought I’d be finished today and decide that I wrecked it last night just before I went home. It’s probably not true, but it needs a new solution now, so drawing board.

It’s Tuesday, says the calendar, nod goes my head and up again to build the next strategic plan. Two weeks until show time at the Residency Artists’ Talk on Feb 26 (6:30pm). I’m looking at four of seven planned pieces, fully aware that they represent a tunnel I’m about to enter.

I asked someone last week whether it was a bad sign that I’ve written the talk before the pieces are done. Apparently not – it’s the reverse, she said. I agree. The paintings themselves feel like improvisations around my understanding of what I’m doing here and why I’m doing it. As they continue to emerge my understanding deepens – like a dance.

Music emerges into an understanding of ‘moment’, too.  A piece of cello music I’ve been playing for thirty years is always a variation of itself, reflected in and by the context of it’s sounding- Courante from Bach suite I, on a murky Tuesday in Hamilton, after my old hp friend signed himself off into the land of recycled parts.

What a layering of things that is!  JS Bach and Hewlett Packard, accompanied by the spitting, hissing Snowdragon Lady outside.

I always have ten people with me now; I begin to understand that I always will have this particular ten. I’m aware that increasingly I yearn for a gathering of us over a slow meal, perhaps, or on a walk together through old trees. I wonder at the levels of curiosity we each carry – how they would ebb and flow, rise and find rest through conversation fragments and simple gestures, how we would weave ourselves into a fabric if we were all in this room together, painting one another, laughing and listening.

I write notes to them through the day. Curiosities – about connections between them. I’m not quite ready to send these, yet. Which is strange, but I trust the process as it unfolds.

I think about kind mirrors and critical mirrors. I wonder if our internal mirrors are always stronger than the external ones.

Composite sketch for Pavement II, who dances differently. We approach one another in earnest on Valentine’s day.

More to come, from the tunnel…