The Mark Maggiori Art Safari: Look at clouds from both sides. Now!
Cleanse your creative palate - get out and consume the clouds of others.
His clouds call to me. With hooded gaze and buxom loll from the far-off beckoning sky, they whisper their seductive tease into the passing updraft and squirrely air of a brush stroke.
“Come to us,” they say. “Come now, oh lost and lonely one.”
They are like sirens of my sky, attempting to herd my mind to the bliss state of their heady atmospheres.
These clouds have spoken to me many times. From the sly pixels of artist Mark Maggiori’s Instagram posts, they have wiggled and shimmied and caught my eye. From within the prison of an app on the screen of a phone, even while confined and not to scale, they have exerted their powerful flex, their potent draw, their—dare I say—handsy reach.
I pinch, I zoom out, I run the curious thumb of my flailing understanding across their chubby cheeks and into their magnetic hues. The color, the flow, the emotional turbulence—I am color dipped, and window fogged. Lost. They have my heart, even at this tiny, digitally rendered scale.
But.
Scrolling and liking aren’t cutting it—not today. It’s not enough.
It is simply not enough.
Cloud bursts and crazy ideas. Milk eddying in black coffee. A simple shock and swirl and the urge must be obeyed.
And so it goes.
On Saturday morning, I pack my truck with on-the-road adventure gear, and I drive for eight hours. I stop in the Mojave Desert. I sleep overnight in a howling, shove-hard wind, my tent flapping wildly while dreaming of clouds and golden frames. As my truck shifts with another gust in the darkness—my rooftop tent rippling upon its perch, with me fearful and cowering inside of it—I attempt to still my mind.
“Art Safari. Art Safari. I am on an Art Safari. Breathe.”
Early Sunday morning I wrestle my tent back into its home as the wind howls hyena-like around my ears. It yips. It screeches. It caterwauls at high volume. I counter.
“Art Safari. Keep your arms inside the vehicle at all times. Art Safari. Breathe.”
Packed and with hair in a wild and windswept tangle, I drive five more hours to Scottsdale, Arizona, check into a hotel, grab my hat, put on my boots, and go downtown. On East Main Street, I climb the stairs to the second floor of the Legacy Gallery, and just like that am delivered to a giant room filled with Mark Maggiori paintings. I am primed and ready to take a pie to the face of pure and delicious clouds.
Ha! Fooled you. This is not a story about clouds.
Art Safari! Art Safari! I am on an Art Safari! Breathe.
It’s also not a story about how Mark Maggiori paints clouds. Though it is a bit. But also, not. Because Mark Maggiori doesn’t just paint clouds.
Mark Maggiori paints the ever-lovin’ shit out of the West. The Big B Bold and vibrant West. As a receiver to what appears to be a very clear signal noise, he channels it through the paint and bristles of his brush and onto the canvas, creating deep portals that—if you happen to be standing right in front of a real live one—will suck you into a squelching warm vortex of emotional reverie.
You will stare; absorb the scene; look from one edge to another and all around. You will shift your eyes and notice the fine-featured cowboys seated upon their horses and wonder idly: What are you thinking about? You will follow their gaze—What are you looking at?—and speculate as to what it is that has caught their off-canvas eye. A steer gone astray? A rabbit? A rider approaching, perhaps?
You will go deeper.
You will observe pools of color and strokes on a mesa and the mesa of your mind will expand and contract. Brain becomes heart, beating and throbbing and on fire at the very pulse of it. Rock and tree and wildflower and cactus. Horse flanks and patterned blankets. Your eye, your eye, your eye—where will it go? What will it see? How will your body absorb it into your conscious being?
Mark Maggiori will show the way.
More than clouds—did I mention clouds?—he's a whole sky guy. And a mesa guy. A vista guy. He’s a 'put a small human in a panorama frame, vision builder' guy. And right now—if Saturday’s auction prices are anything to go by—he’s having a moment.1 How amazing that feeling must be? To work so hard, produce, and then have it all pay off in one glorious night. He must be humming. He must be absolutely vibrating with the buzz of it.
So. More than clouds (you get it) but let’s talk about them. Sometimes there, sometimes not—just like real clouds! Confident and swaggering, they giggle in their shimmering orange and pink cloaks in the mornings and afternoons and all-day longs, unfurling as willing backdrops to the drama of the day. Professional photo bombers, these clouds steal shows and chew through the scene. In a good way.
Big and billowy, fluffy and light, angry and hot thunderheads, the list of cloud personalities is staggering. It's clouds illusions, you'll recall, that Joni Mitchell doesn't know clouds at all2. Mark Maggiori doesn't seem to have this problem. But—say it with me—this is not a story about clouds!
What then?
This is a story about color. (Not clouds.) This is a story about purpose. (Not clouds.) It’s a story about letting your purpose color your path and following it, which is a cloudy thought poorly expressed. It’s a story about finding expression and letting it flow through your fingers and into your work. Your relentless, unending, meaningful, and joyful work. There. Clearer.
It’s a story about dedicating yourself to getting those sacred things and places out of you, to let your “clouds as metaphor” flow and roil and billow and translate the sun’s bright thoughts, and planet’s menace, and nature’s rage, and to allow your human dreams to appear as the surreal and sublime angels of interpretation that they are.
But most of all (most of all, she says, as a way of justifying driving for 13 hours on a whim to look at paintings) I think this is a story about “Art Safari, Art Safari, I am on an Art Safari.” About why it’s important to submit to and commit to your role as Forever Student of life, of people, and of creative pursuits.
Because you can never know what you don’t know if you never know.
(About clouds.)
It’s a story about the value of stepping away from your desk or easel or guitar or camera every now and then—on a whim—to expose yourself to the work of others as a way of reaffirming your commitment to YOUR OWN. To allow yourself to be inspired by others: both their art and/or success.
Art Safari! Art Safari! Art Safari! Breathe.
Let the work of others gather on your horizon. Brooding. Menacing. Dappled. And then?
GO AND LOOK AT OTHER PEOPLE’S CLOUDS!
Make haste! Go! Ándale!
Find work that is outside of what you do. Work that you yourself cannot create. Don’t know how to. Don’t have the skills for. Find. Put on your boots. Go and look.
And in closing.
Mark Maggiori can paint ‘em. Joni Mitchell can sing about ‘em. And I can write about ‘em.
Clouds.
This is totally a story about clouds.
Yours in tiny thought,3
Janeen
More photos will be on my Instagram.
This week’s amends…
“You don’t need to get yourself into a mess with it, but you do have that inevitable slump after a project, where you feel creatively drained, which almost verges on depression. I’ve got it so fine-tuned that after about 6 months my antenna comes out and starts looking for more inspiration. I’m not as unconfident about it, the self-doubt is still there, but I know what I can do.”- Jason Williamson, Sleaford Mods, Nine Songs interview
Via The Line of Best Fit
On Rotation: "Clint Eastwood” by The Gorillaz
I bought this album (on CD) when it first came out and I was living in Singapore. Lonely and in a strange land, I found lots of solace in playing the absolute shit out of it on my MiniDisc (remember those!), and I don’t mind saying I was a little obsessed with it. The video with Albarn below shows a lovely bit of song insight that I wasn’t expecting to blow my mind quite so much (play the first minute and see what I mean.)
Still on the fence about getting Cracker Island on vinyl, but this post pushed me a little closer.
Damon Albarn: Studio Tour, ‘Cracker Island’ & Coachella
Via a tweet. Yeah, Twitter still serves up cool stuff to me occasionally!
"To be abundantly clear, it is not a crime to give someone the finger."
This judge rules in favor of the bird.
Via Boing Boing
This is the moment “In the Middle Runs a River” (below) sold for a cool half million on Saturday. Needs more clouds! (No, it doesn’t. It’s perfect. Also, that red suit Mark is wearing is AMAZING!)
I did not plan this trip beyond getting to Scottsdale, AZ. Where should I go next to look at “clouds”? Santa Fe?
Yes to Santa Fe! And Sedona! And Flagstaff! And Boulder??