Mary draws and Mary writes from silence,
silence that uplifts and holds her. These strings,
she thinks, are more than finite. They wrap all things
and draw them to her. Every weight and every measure,
all things tossed or turned or treasured,
all things simple, green or rusted, doubted, doubled, drummed
or busted, all things filtered out and saved, or wasted,
all things stirring, dead, or passive
all the unknown multitude of things
enormous as a whole, and as a whole, so quiet.
Like Mary’s eyes, so quiet. Mary draws from silence.
mine enemy grows older 
a wonderful place from which to draw
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I love the way it sounds, “Mary draws from silence”, love the notion of it.
Nochipa
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Beautiful, exceptional.
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Thank you, guys. Nochipa, I’ll put another painting up sometime today. Check back… maybe you or your daughter would like to make a poem or story out of it?
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I love how the poem begins and ends with the same line. The strings as they change throughout the poem stay with me, and help me understand Mary. The illustration is wonderful, the whole post is spot on.
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thanks christine
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Very nice, Rick.
~~Out of silence & solitary
moments…Childhood & creativity,
merge.
You’ve captured this so very well,
in these refraining lines.
Cheers!
~(^_^)~Will
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i grabbed this photo quite some time ago,, but the piece didn’t flow out of it till this morning… here is my interpretation of this wonderful drawing…
bag lady
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I read this poem as a treatise on meditation, on one man’s attempt to find that place between self and spirit; that wonderul quiet balanced silence, the white place. I do not get to inhabit that place much. My monkey right brain likes to chatter multi-dimensionally, and this makes relocating my consciousness arduous.
Add to this your wonderful contact with your inner child, whether there be cannibalism or not, and your creativity flies like an eaglet. Which came first, the image or the language. Do you create the paintings or drawings first, or do you illustrate your mind’s eye, and your heart’s delight.
I dug this poem too, and posted it along with some of your other work on FFTR. It came out thusly:
Mary Draws From Silence
Mary draws
and Mary writes
from silence,
silence that uplifts
and holds her.
These strings,
she thinks,
are more
than finite.
They wrap all things
and draw them
to her.
Every weight
and every measure,
all things tossed
or turned
or treasured,
all things simple,
green
or rusted,
doubted,
doubled,
drummed
or busted,
all things filtered out
and saved,
or wasted,
all things stirring,
dead,
or passive;
all the unknown multitude
of things
enormous
as a whole,
and as a whole–
so quiet.
Like Mary’s eyes,
so quiet.
Mary draws from
silence.
Rick Mobbs May 28, 2008
***Gently rearranged by Glenn Buttkus.
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Wow, being a blogger can be so frustrating. I just seemed to “lose” a nice long comment, and a transcription and rearrangement of this poetic effort of yours–stuff about meditation and your inner child and the great hall of white silence within, and your creativity, which seems to boundless and without barriers, and asking you if you do the painting first and then define your iconraphy with the language, or do you write the words, and then paint the image of your mind’s eye, or heart’s joy, or colon’s pain.
I love this poem too, and told you that I have posted it on FFTR, and that it came out like this:
Mary Draws From Silence
Mary draws
and Mary writes
from silence,
silence that uplifts
and holds her.
These strings,
she thinks,
are more
than finite.
They wrap all things
and draw them
to her.
Every weight
and every measure,
all things tossed
or turned
or treasured,
all things simple,
green
or rusted,
doubted,
doubled,
drummed
or busted,
all things filtered out
and saved,
or wasted,
all things stirring,
dead,
or passive;
all the unknown multitude
of things
enormous
as a whole,
and as a whole–
so quiet.
Like Mary’s eyes,
so quiet.
Mary draws from
silence.
Rick Mobbs May 28, 2008
***Gently rearranged by Glenn Buttkus.
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hey Glen, interesting to see these things take a new form. I’m not sure how I feel about them yet. We get attached to our old ways, you know? But I like what you are doing, taking them in new directions, and I’m open…
as to boundlessness? I run into boundaries, frustrating dead spots and the like all the time. Get tired and want to take naps, get distracted and want to play in the garden with the kids, feel old and worn out. You know, all that good stuff.
Images and language… the images generally come without language when I am doing art work. My hands do the work. It sounds cliched but I really do try and get out of the way. When working with words I am often just trying to catch a rhythm, a cadence, and a thread of images I try to describe as I go, with lots of backtracking, recasting. Things tend to grow organically.
Working with words with images in one place is something I have wanted to do for a long time. Blogging gives me a vehicle to do that.
How does it work for you?
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Rick:
Thanks for being so generous with your poetry, your paintings, your very soulfulness. I sense that you are still a bit in shock that some putz from deep out there in cyberland can find new twists, new directions, new insights in what you have already created. You liked the idea of letting many poets and writers approach your images of your paintings, and head off any direction with it; and I admit that is healthy, zany, creative, resourceful. In a way, it is very presumptious of me to “mess” with the way your words spilled out, the way you designed the lines, saw the energy, let the cat out of the bag–and truthfully, I don’t know how I would feel if someone took one of my poems and “saw” it differently, changed the look of it, the feel of it to fit their personality, their perceptions. So, again, I really appreciate your openness and willingness to admit that art belongs to the world, and since we are of the world as artists, why not use your very unique blog, unique points of view, unique personality as a format, as a staging area for astonishing creativity. Your “storybook” that is in transition, in gestation, will be incredible; hopefully actually publishable.
You seem to have limitless energy to those of us that see how quickly you create your fabulous artwork, so your “dead spots” are well mantled with the dazzle of your spirituality and productivity. I love the notion that you,”get out of the way” of the work; that the flow, the connection to that constant flow of God’s wisdom, of universal resonance, is something organic, nearly sometimes inexplicable. At best, we as artists, can only dabble in it, drop our single toe, or our single finger into it, bringing back a piece of this and a piece of that, and endeavoring to share it with words, with paint, with heart, with pain. So, from my meager point of view, your paintings do have language, like a jazz musicican improvising, seeing the visualizations, the images, not just notes–finding a way to communicate the inferno of thoughts and icons that stir up within you on a regular basis. On my blog, I love posting poetry, or song lyrics, or narrative, and then searching for just the right image that conveys, sometimes, even more than the words, yet compliments and enhances the language. I am primarily a writer, and I am cataloging imagery every second that I breath, in every phase of every moment of every day. I am a movie buff and reviewer, and sometimes my life is a movie, and movies are my life. Mountains and ocean have special spiritual dominion to me. I have had the kiss of the dragon, have had kundalini energy leap from the ozone, from beyond the veil and save my life, have seen a UFO at 100 yards, have seen ghostly visitors passing from the portals within the home that chose me 17 years ago, do believe in Sasquatch, and find myself driving lonely logging roads anxious for my first sighting. And I find your blog site to be as visceral and personal a vision as I have ever encountered in my life; something valuable, shimmering with possibilities. Thanks for sharing, and for being shared.
Glenn
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