Early canvas

Landscapes, imaginary and real.

Sketchbook pages and practice canvases from 90s and early 2000s

“Simulating Midnight” – July 3, 2013 – Version 2

Inspired by Kiki Smith’s artworks, Mark Rothko’s Harvard Murals, Stanley Kubrick’s use of color and time, Maggie Nelson’s writing.

JASON DEAN ARNOLD

Read this poem at NNATAN’s page.

nnatantwo:

AMPLIFIER

Beyond words,
birds are burning,
& I’m walking with nothing but a snaking horn,
Singing photographs from silent stars
into whisperwalls

Into

the camera of time’s tiny bones
partially buried backwards through the sound or rhythms

Missing from music.

When those birds
can’t sing
above their own flames,

Attempt to veil softly, reflecting any feather artifacts
closer to mine.

And
when we are blind:

Keep the birds clean,
& even angels won’t understand
your eyelids.

Anna snapped this photo of me at St. Mark’s in NYC. I was scanning the poetry section like it held a secret.

Bloom red and open-ended/ Questions break your line/ More than once.

Besides the weird capitalizations, I stand by the rest.
Poem for my dad that includes traces of my grandmother and aunt, my biological father, Turner’s paintings, November 8 (Dad’s birthday), fear of flying, my dad as pilot, etc.

My art teacher in high school, Dale Newman, once asked the class to paint pieces of the ceiling. What I loved about this act was that it allowed me and the rest of my classmates to define part of the room, part of the space we inhabited every single day. We were designing our environment in a small way. This had a deep impact on my own teaching…years later. I asked the students if they’d like to paint the ceiling like it was part of the sky. The building was old, and the rooms could feel small and stifling. We decided to paint the ceiling, grow a garden, etc. It had very little to do with a specific lesson and more to do with life. Sometimes, we all need to just change the setting to make our lives a little more like our dreams.