=Book recently read: Living Color: Painting, Writing, and the Bones of Seeing by Natalie Goldberg=

This is another one of those books that try to convince people that art and writing aren't just for artists and writers. Artists and writers defined as those having a special innate talent with words or brush and, even more importantly, those able to make money with their artistic and literary productions. 

There will never be an end to these books so long as there is no end to the blind acceptance of cultural values that stress activities of practical, utilitarian, and economic worth over those of self-development, inner peace, and spiritual uplift. So long as it's more important to work sixty hours a week or change the contact paper in the kitchen cabinets than to "waste time" painting an ivy-covered wall or write a poem about a pigeon pecking at a crushed paper cup, books like "Living Color" will continue to be necessary, like a voice shouting into the idiot whirlwind, offering the prospect of a different, more enriching way to spend our precious time on earth than inflating our bank accounts or tidying the upstairs closets.

Goldberg tries to convince us that process is more important than product. That painting and writing are not just about publishing the Great American Novel or selling a painting to wealthy collector, not about winning the Nobel Prize for Literature or having  a retrospective at the Whitney. More importantly, the "arts" are an incalculably valuable way for each of us to engage with the world around us and within us. It's about noticing shit. It's about discovering the world and ourselves on more than the superficial, distracted level at which we're encouraged to remain by advertisers, politicians, and religious dogmatists.

Goldberg offers a generous selection of her own work by way of example. Her paintings are unschooled and improvisational, intuitive, awkward, amateurish, even crude at times but in an undeniably charming way, partaking as they do of that no-eraser, draw-it-in-ink, first-line-best-line-only-line philosophy that Goldberg imbibes through her study of Zen. These paintings are more sketches than finished work and all the more alive and immediate for that. So full of color and electricity are these works that no matter how "real" in origin their subject matter there is an intensity and energy to them  that make them more real than reality. 

Goldberg borrows from one of her artistic heroes—Matisse—to fill her pictures from edge to edge with color and pattern. When she departs from using the phenomenal world as her subject matter, she employs the same basic strategy. In a particularly apt "explanation" of abstract art, which she was led to after the death of her zen teacher, Katagiri Roshi, Goldberg says,  "The material world is a fine thing, but it is not the only thing. There are worlds beyond this world. When my teacher died, I knew he was out there where I couldn’t physically see him, just at the edge of a chrysanthemum petal or  in the moment I turned my head, in the flash between neurons, or in the sunlight, or on a cold morning in the haze of a horse’s breath. I wanted my paintings to communicate with him. I had to step out of form to do it."

Through the practice of art, at whatever level, we learn to slow down time, to really "see," and the more we practice the deeper and clearer our vision becomes. What we make doesn't have to change the course of art history or become a New York Times  bestseller. It doesn't have to be beautiful or eloquent. It doesn't even have to be shared. All it needs to be is made. All it needs to do is plug us in, to engage us.

Here I am engaging with my sneakers and with a stoop in Ridgewood, Queens yesterday afternoon, using an envelope I was carrying around: