Why Paint?

"Theirs is not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die." - from "Charge of the Light Brigade" by Alfred Lord Tennyson

The questions, "How did you learn to paint?" and "Who are your influences?" are inextricably linked for Marcus.

I am self taught with a deep appreciation for the amazing artists who have given their lives to create timeless master paintings. I am a voyeur, who cherishes a peek at the provocative lives of other artists. Through the lens of their passion, much can be learned.

My influences are many, and with numerous styles.
Holbien Robert Bateman
Vermeer Julie Speed
Rembrandt Walton Ford
Van Gogh The Wyeth Family
Picasso
Pollock
Edward Hopper

The litany of names could indeed be a "light brigade" of artists. Men and women who could do no other but create through color, and values, paint, brush, canvas, all of them compelled and driven to express a vision bigger than the individual.

The question is not so much "why paint?" as it is, "how can I refuse?" The calling is irresistible and irrefutable. Tennyson's Light Brigade shows how one can be helpless and heroic at the same time. Artists are also like that. The artist makes a masterpiece from his flawed, often heartbreaking, unique experience. He transforms what he sees into rare form through his love and his skills. From Vermeer to Andrew Wyeth to Julie Speed, the lives of artists bear this out. Marcus writes:

An endless smile forms as I consider the depth of inspiration that echoes in my brain and seeps through my senses. . . Inspiration surrounds me! I gather from the daily bombardment of stimulation - the birds we feed, the sounds and sights of the familiar, changes in landscape resulting from the growth in the mountains of western N.C., and also the natural change of seasons. It's impossible not to see priceless beauty as well as the destructive pressures of a modern society.

Perhaps the painter's burning question is not why?, but how? How to convey everything honestly, how to charge the image with the urgency and vigor of life, how to fully honor the love of the world that so quickly vanishes?

Q&A - Ask the Artist

For the next few weeks, this space will be an exploration - the back and forth of question and answer sessions with Marcus. He will honestly and authentically address any question put forth in good faith.

You, dear reader, are invited to submit your questions for the artist below in the comments.

The first of entry to the Q&A series is:

What are the limitations of being a quadriplegic painter? Are there some things you just can't do artistically?

Marcus says:

I am always trying to defy the odds. It amplifies the excitement and fuels my passion. So, instead of thinking about limitations, I "dwell in the possibilities." The deeper I explore the possibilities of my tools - the paint/brush - the more the idea of limitation fades.

Sure, there is a practical size constraint. Large is not strategically sound and involves unfair demands outside of my control. Accordingly, I strive to create modest size paintings that hopefully contain a lasting, large, voice.

Keeping to a modest size does not eliminate the need for assistance but does reduce it.

Painting various segments of any given scene requires the raising and lowering of the easel for my brush as well as rotating the painting surface itself. The perspective provided by rotation helps with accurate drawing, plus also allows a broader reach with the brush. If a painting looks good upside down, the possibilities are endless!

Work in Progress

An excerpt from the book, tentatively titled:

The Art of Marcus C. Thomas: A Painter's Journey Through Paralysis

If art is a conversation human beings have with the world they are thrown into, Marcus Thomas has a lot to say. “Art comes out of suffering,” Marcus admits, reflecting on the lives of the masters,“but that doesn’t mean you have to suffer with your art.”

The conversation he participates in through his brush strokes and colors is one that is informed by suffering. The ultimate point of his conversation, however, is beauty and resilience.

Wreckage is a subtle but recurring theme in Marcus’ work - dilapidated churches, broken windows, fallen birds, birds captured and killed, beached rowboats. Yet, just about every broken thing you find in his paintings is also amazingly full of life - inhabited by birds or surrounded by natural splendor. Though the fragility of life, something Marcus knows so well, is honestly part of the picture, the story never ends in wreckage; suffering never has the last hurrah.

Marcus' paintings, from his depictions of landscapes and songbirds to his more symbolic statements, reveal both a world on the verge and the painter’s effort to save it in meticulous brushstrokes and bold imagery. Marcus is a painter capable of showing his audience the world they live in, which is often a world they have never seen before. His life, and the artistic accomplishment that it is - born of suffering, beautiful and resilient, shows us the same world.

Filling in the blanks

Closing in.

Gratifying day! Guiding the book project through a critical juncture, Anne and Leslee achieved a level of clarity that brushed a touch of gold throughout the pages. At the end of Fridays session, the tragic snow skiing accident had been relived through a detailed account of events. A roller coaster only Anne,family and friends could have ridden.
Embracing the journey!
Marcus

13 Ways of Looking

Raven detail from "The Watch"

Inspired by Wallace Steven's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" which you can read online by clicking the link.


Thirteen Ways to See a Raven

1. The opportunist never sleeps.

2. Three blackbirds is a good omen representing   
    brightness and goodness. 
    Perhaps Wallace was in good spirits that day.

3. Ignoring change, the bird was blending, adapting, 
    playing.
   Or, simply delivering a message of doom in the face of nature's dramatic change. (magical change)

4. Blackbirds (corvids) are monogamous representing relationship longevity .

5. The blackbird sings in riddle, allusive and suggestive.
    Perhaps the tune is like the bartender's last call!

6. The ghost appears outside the window, waving warning or just playing.
    Perhaps the weight of winter is seeping in.

7. The blackbird should not be shunned because of its blackness for its value is gold.

8. The spiritual blackbird, the watchful eye.

9. Significant moment , birthday?
    Life map mile marker. Personal growth , one step closer to death.

10. Emotions soar when the blackbirds fly.
      Feelings can be dark as death,
      or bright as the sun,
      even on a cloudy day.

11. Perhaps, death follows closely.

12. When the blackbird stirs, nature is on the move.
      The pace of the planet is a fine rhythm.

13. Always present, the blackbird never sleeps!


And you, faithful reader? Tell us how the blackbird looks from your perspective. Help us get 13 responses below. 

Making Time for Walden - Cabin in the Woods

Marcus and I are reading Thoreau's Walden or Life in the Woods in the midst of trying times.

I bought my copy of Walden and Other Writings from The Strand bookstore in New York City in September of 2000, when I was terribly homesick for the mountains of North Carolina. When I picked it up yesterday, for the first time in years (not counting unpacking and packing it) I found within the pages, in the chapter called "Solitude" pictures of my long-gone friend Ishmael and the garden we grew together on the Bruce Farm in Mars Hill, NC. Calvin Chandler, who had cows and a tractor, plowed and raked over the soil for me - half an acre worth - and I planned to grow enough vegetables to keep students and families of Mars Hill in fresh vegetables all season. The task would prove much easier to dream than to realize - not so much the growing (I had the Ishmael, with about 7o years of gardening experience, to help me) but what to do with all the vegetables and how to get my classmates to come shovel manure in the name of community.

So mostly, it was just me and Ish at the garden. The photos are a result of my excitement at the vast, plowed expanses of what would be my garden. It was the fall of 1993, and I was starting a garden of greens and crimson clover. Ish and I were talking about how to lay everything out, and I caught a great crooked picture on a little disposable camera of Ish walking off a row, followed by two scrappy beagles, whose names I can't remember but know that I have recorded in a journal somewhere in the pink liquorstore box in my closet here in South Asheville, in the late summer of 2011.

Ishmael died in the late nineties, when I was living in New York. The place where our garden was is, last I checked, an embankment that serves as an entrance to a gated community, now starting to show the age, despair and neglect of the recent few years.

So what does all this have to do with work on Marcus' 25- year retrospective? Well, this remains to be seen, but I suspect it's because a retrospective is, necessarily, a lot about time, timing, looking back and wondering. It involves asking, sometimes too, what to make of a diminshed thing - whether we're talking about the natural world we once knew, or the people we used to be. That's the hard part. But. A retrospective well done can have a happy ending, and help us re-member ourselves as surely as we see the same person in the mirror when we pause to look ourself in the eye, every time.

Plus, in the middle of August, really, especially, who doesn't dream of retreating to a remote cabin in the woods, to study the of late summer drone of crickets and cicada, and to stare at the deepening sky, trying to catch and name that particular shade of blue. Closest thing to hitching a ride on the watch in the detail of Marcus' "The Watch" and flying into that deep color blue.

In hectic times like these, it's good to have some sort of retreat, a cabin in the woods to re-member. Maybe that's reading a book you once loved, or losing yourself in an art, the practice of making something. And then, added to that, an invitation to a good friend's "cabin" in the woods wouldn't hurt.

Marcus writes:

Walden

My cabin in the woods:
No roof.
No walls.
Canvas provides shelter from the cold,
Paint fuels the warmth,
brush along,
Invitation only!

-----------------------August 2011

Come visit us here anytime. Tell us how you retro-spect and re-member. And share where you found your "cabin in the woods" where you make the time, in these times, to practice your art, whatever it is you practice.

Dwell in Possibility: Religion, Science and the Art of Metaphor

Detail from the painting titled "The Watch"

In The Life of the Skies, Jonathan Rosen talks a lot about the fracturing of the world (or the western mind) that happened after Darwin. It's a fracture Rosen himself is still trying to heal, through birdwatching as an mediating activity - one that makes people look up and see. For Rosen, as for many of us who love birds, what we see when we look up is the glory of a bird, but also all that the bird represents - literally, spiritually. Metaphorically.


He talks a lot about naturalists of that time - Darwin, Alfred Lord Wallace. And about how they also sought the divine in their work, whether this was made explicit, or not. Wallace, for example, spent years on the Malay Archipelago before he finally found the bird that sent him on this quest - the bird of paradise - a bird in which the natural and the spiritual seem to meet by virtue of a name!

Rosen uses poetry to really bring out the spiritual aspect of birding. He connects Alfred Lord Wallace's quest and love with Wallace Steven's mystical bird, the one in "Of Mere Being" that sings "in the palm at the end of the mind." Rosen makes a good distinction we really appreciate between the materialist versus naturalist.

Marcus responds to this idea in a way that reminds us of poetry, reflecting on his life, confined, yet metaphorically free through the natural world he creates in art. The following words to the conclusion of the post are his thoughts, shared with you. The featured image is a detail from his current work, the painting, titled "The Watch," which you can see in progress in the slideshow to the right:

My confined life is metaphorical happiness.
I should be miserable because?

But, I do not accept misery as a solution.

Self value is part of measuring happiness.
I have purpose, the result is bliss.

Emily Dickinson pops up the the book Life of the Skies too. Her poem, "I dwell in Possibility" evoked this response:

Why not live a life without restriction.
An infinite perspective is the fountain of youth.
Which feeds our hunger to search in a spiritual and or scientific way.

I love the intertwined idea of science and religion. Because I breathe the metaphorical, my acceptance of both is satisfying. I am not grasping for Big answers! Content with the obvious, focusing on MY metaphorical foot print and embracing what is real.
This is my consumption!
Reality is the foundation, for I live in an abstract frame.
Escape through paint, brush and love? YOU BET! If your mind becomes bored with your heart, you are defeated.
Rock on!