It sometimes takes a giant interruption to crystallize your thinking. Prolonged concentration is hardly ever productive. Margaret Explosion often has its best nights when we are either exhausted or completely overwhelmed with life’s complications. You can’t force possibilities. You can only open yourself up to them.
So here I am in my studio for the first time in months. The mattress my brother slept on when he was in town is still sprawled out on the floor. A series of paintings, half of them unfinished, line the walls. A short stack of them sits on the floor. The still life of old bottles that I shot to show my father is still staged theatricly on a piece of white panel board. I could paint them for the rest of my life the way Georgio Morandi did. On my work table I have about twenty sheets of purple, hand-made paper that Roy Sowers gave me. I forget what I was going do with them.
There’s a newspaper clipping of Vladimir Putan shaking Bashar al Assad’s hand, two distinctly different body types and postures in an animated pose. There’s a small notebook with scattered thoughts, overheard snippets of conversion and abstract sketches. A good starting point for something. And of course the most recent Crimestoppers page is waiting for me. A package of black construction paper sits next to a bowl of pink ribbons that we found on trees in the woods. It occurs to me that those two things could work together. There’s the big charcoal drawing on my easel. Can I pick up where I left off? And then I’m looking at this weathered wooden end to an old lobster trap that I found along the coast in Maine. The nail holes in the barn shaped board are surrounded by rust. It’s beautiful just the way it is.
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