Line-nine, reads as follows.

June 29, 2008 in brushes, figurative, letter

I wanted to write a story.  But then the lines I wrote tired me.  Nothing sounded like I had imagined it.  I am disappointed and now writing about it.  As I read the lines, before I erased them, my thoughts turned to art.  I began to think, what would it take to succeed and write minimally.  If only a couple words emerged and no thought prevailed behind them?   What is minimalism?  Is that it?

There I am,  looking out in space where a line breaks, and the pieces of it fly across the night.  The pieces scattering beautifully.  Beautiful pictures, because they spread to remind me of the moment.  The moment before the break, the line I was drawing, weaving in circles and squares.

Then there was that moment– the minimal.  Minimum, characterized by geometry.  But imperfect, because no hand is steady, no mind that is perfect.  So when drawing across the blank night, the white of the lines bleed.  Every hand holding tightly, looking into the future, for the next moment, where the line can joined with other lines.  Our minds are taken from the imperfection of each patter, every thought, breath, and blink.  But then again, we are reminded of the eyes that cross, the hyper-ventilation, and double thoughts.

We overlook the lines we draw, by following those of others.  Others that fill in our thoughts, like the single colors smeared inside the outline.  After watching the night, the line ends.  For just as it ends, another appears.  Caught from day-to-day, confused whether one was just drawing or thinking, moving or sleeping.  And in the latter, when thinking and sleeping, one remembers the other.  How the other picked up where you left off or what was left off.  There is the minimal, the conditions for possibility.

Colors smeared as if they existed.  Like the color flows, flowing out with every beat or flash of my eyes.  I watch the lines, you now draw.  There, in my identity, locked with the last piece of a snapped night.  Spinning off into the distance, as I draw smaller, there I see you, picking up the color.  As I pass into the dark, you weave another story.

There is simplicity in minamalism.  There are lines upon which, one thinks, they can walk.  I walk the lines, as if I had the choice, of picking up a brush instead.  There is minimalism, if you can imagine, it is a type of scratching in the dark: along someone else’s paper.