Random acts of nature

This awesome sunflower came up through a crack in the concrete behind my house.

It was probably planted by a bird or squirrel and this random act of nature provides me with a smile every time I walk out the back door.

It also reminds me that miracles can be small and unassuming, you just have to look in the right places.

There needs to be two of me

I really need a double. I want to be someone who can spend all their time being creative, making art & all together making the world a more funky place.

Too often life intrudes upon art. I have to feed the family and buy more dog food write emails and ship packages. This is more then enough for one person to sanely handle. I need a second "me" to run my life while the real me is busy creating.

Sometimes I wish I did not feel this creative urge and I could concentrate on things like on figuring out which health insurance plan I cannot afford the least. But damn it art calls and art always wins.

I am getting ready for the Bucktown Arts Fest in Chicago this month, and I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about what I will make and what I have to finish.

I don't have time to eat, or eat the right things, sleep enough, or I sleep too much because I have exhausted myself trying to do it all. I blame art. It is like a drug. I only feel good when I am doing it.

I wonder if there is a 12 step program for recovering artists

Looking at the Moon

For some reason, I feel most creative at night. Perhaps it's the quiet, or I have gotten all the mundane tasks out of the way, but I truly feel some kind of energy during the night that I don't have during the daylight hours.

Last night I made my first post to "Watch Me Create". Somehow it didn't feel right to do it in the daylight hours.

Now if I could only figure out a way to get my daughter up for school at 7:30 am after I have been up to 3 am being creative, I would have some harmony in my schedule.

Walt Whitman's Angel

This is a sculpture I just finished. Its called Walt Whitman's Angel.

Lately, I have been fascinated, ( maybe even obsessed) with Walt Whitman.

His poetry and life are a bottomless source of inspiration.

He explored the nature of life and death in many poems, years before he even witnessed the horrors of the civil war and comforted dying soldiers in the hospitals of Washington DC.

In leaves of Grass he writes:

I will make the true poem of riches....

And I will show that there is no imperfection in the present, and can be none in the future,

And I will show that whatever happens to anybody it may be turn'd to beautiful results,

And I will show that nothing can happen more beautiful than death,

And I will thread a thread through my poems that time and events are compact,

And that all things of the universe are perfect miracles, each as profound as any.

I imagine him comforting the dying soldiers. He must have seemed like some strange large bearded angel helping them pass onto the next world, watching their souls leave their destroyed bodies. In his own estimation he tended 80 to 100 thousand wounded men. And yet he still saw beauty in everything, even death.