The Rapture of Creativity

The Rapture of Creativity ***     May 20, 2010

The show at the Willits Art Center is comprised of three artists, two Painters and something I am not sure of, that looks like paper machied bottles and I am not interested in them by any means. They remind me vaguely of an elementary class project. But the paintings!
These two artists have caught the everyday chores of washing cracked plates and stacking them slant-wise in a home-made wooden dish drainer, painted flowers in a vase I felt I could smell lush all over my skin, a woman sunning herself in color...These paintings held our County, our way of living, our muse the same way the Poets long ago translated Mendocino County into syllables and consonants and breath that make the vowel sounds of water from ocean to creek that disappears in July or August.

The only thing missing in the completion of Mendocino County's own unique language is in the music arena. Raggae and Celtic tunes belong to their own islands. The Farmer's Market Band and Redbud are the closest, so far, to capturing the sound of Mendocino County that is slowly and sometimes at the speed of lightening, creating our own heartbeat. What Tamson Donner and Caroline Hawley have done with paint is by no means lost in translation. Their work is the song of the land and the song of 'country living' that doesn't mean C and W. Those paintings are 'just home' and I am grateful I was allowed the honor of seeing it, almost crawling into the different canvases and making myself, well, at home....the only thing missing was a turned down radio back in some room playing tunes I had never heard before,except in Redbud and at the Market; never heard outside my own d.n.a. , never listened to in the heart's beat where the drums mix in with the bass and the low notes on the concertina. I long for Mendonesia to have their own music, their own angelic hipster sound, as Kerouac would say,and 'with a trace of Country Joe and the Fish for sweet sloppiness mixed in a kinda Fair Port Convention and all the poets giving their words. It's a dream I've had since moved here almost 43 years. But my friends say let the musicians sound like they want. YOU like the sound you just described. What I want to say is a mixture of all those components of music mixed with each others' themes,would be our sound, because we have different background. It's a circus up here, I tell ya.