The Art Of Homemade Signs

The idea for the next painting: to enclose a poem in fire using geometric shapes while acknowledging fire contains the color white.

My love of abstraction has no boundaries, it's as endless as nature, as much nature as nature itself. Hence I read the kinds of books that cause others to say, "that's not the kind of book I'd read," not understanding why people buy books like the book of John Bolton. These kind of books go to early graves, as they should, or onto the bookshelves of important people interviewed via Skype by news anchor people who have the big book by Hillary Clinton, What Happened, propped up on their own bookshelves by the biographies of Ulysses Grant and Henry Kissinger.

I'm currently reading the handwritten signs posted on the windows of little businesses on Geary between 15th and 28th Avenues, as a pastiche of poetic pleas and urgent messages regarding the state of the union. All of them touch a place in the heart saved for feeling in a concrete, representational way, another human being's suffering and uncertainty regarding the future, so that by the time I come home from my walk along Geary I understand once again my constant return to abstraction. Abstraction is both a foray and retreat into a world of my own making, while being guided by the examples of the many great people who lived through world wars, pandemics, depressions, and poor leadership themselves.

Home, I write in my notebook for a few minutes about what I've seen on my walk along Geary, so that I won't forget it, and then make a few moves on my new painting. The painting's going well because I'm going slowly. There's still more white than there is color, but I can forsee how that will change over time as the painting and I progress, and yellow and blue and black and especially the tube of the cadmium red I've come to respect for its life-changing visual impact, start to speak out and to have lives of their own.

The idea for the painting after the painting I'm making now of a poem enclosed in fire: to be the kind of artist who solves things as he goes along.

Homemade sign, Simple Cuts Spa and Hair, Geary Ave. & 26th. San Francisco, June 16, 2020. Photo by Brooks Roddan