Mirror Art

Mirror Art

         I’ll paint you a picture, a very beautiful painting, one that will meet white walls and people’s hearts and the underserving’s pockets, one that will last over time. However, I will not paint it alone. Give me your hand. I’ll give you my heart. And this, can only be, your start.

         Picture and paint with me, move your hand in time with the rhythm that courses through the weight of your brush. A fine brush it is too. One already full with its magic and paint, which is not made of the finest woods, or the most delicate thistles. This is a brush of flesh; sixth finger on your weaker hand. An extension of you more than it is an extension of a muscle. Paint that comes not from without but within. Colors so vivid and shiny, that blend together like water on life, describing with each stroke and each run of wet paint the decals of life. Which life? Your life, no doubt. The one you can only begin to feel after you have described it with you own two hands. Heavy stuff, not to ever belong in the hands of the wide-eyed weary traveler down their worn path. Are you of such? Let us find out together.

         What do we paint today? Lend me your hand for this is not a picture to be found alone. This is the picture of such a caliber beauty that it will set your heels into the vaporous earth and bring you away from yourself into the arms of swaying trees. Extend your reach, but not your physical self, and give it unto my belt, for now I am the guide, planter of the seeds of the wind, and will help you to reach beyond yourself and through and between the canvass our paints soon mix upon.

Now then, take that hand so blessedly loaded with the mass of your mind. Raise the hand with paint and swallow your terror as it arks into our night sky. Feel it breathe, feel your beat, and love you’re overcrowded and painfully imaged world, then love it to let it let you forget about it all. For this art is not one of your own. Now take back the world and let it tear your chest asunder, scratching your being and racking open everything that is out in the open world, closed within you. Allow your arm to be grasped by a mannered gravity and float back to the earth, like pure white feathers falling fast, tumbling through the slow savage sounds of our own orchestra, describing in full length the absolute beauty in which the slow motion travesty takes place. In this free fall, do not become alarmed. Do not blindly stretch your arms beyond inside you and cling back to yourself again. Embrace the fact you have no control in this journey, a comet hurdled now towards whatever is beyond your splashing tail; paddling for the air but only taking you ever farther under. And Strike. As the mess of paint attempts to control its decent into the oblivion hidden under your waist. Control it: don’t allow it to hold itself, however never let go of it, or even reign it in close to you. Instead, allow for it to hold onto itself. For this art comes not from you, but of you. So strike the dry white of canvas and feed upon the grains of insanity as the wet reality ponders into puddles of shapes, filling every small pre-shaped crater with the life of reflected shadows. Strike again and forever more until the sweat created on your arm sweeps down and adds itself as rivers among puddles, giving life to the lifeless and inanimate, Even then; when the eternal fire kinder itself in your heart and burns its way down your spine and up through your temple, continue to paint.

         As you finish, at the height of pleasure’s plethora of pain, when it seems impossible to find the avenues all away from the near end of your journey, it is here that it is most important for you to hear my voice struggling to pierce through the pit that became your tone. Drop yourself and lay back against the wind from under you, now hoping to fill your pockets with the buoyance that is the world you have created. And look now, upon your creation; in all of its genius devastation.

         See: do you see? The paint that faith has emboldened with gold’s linked rose bud, vined along the outer edge of the work still progressing. Withheld in this you may now behold what is so bold to be dutifully your soul. Birds glide through the lower most part of the art, through air so cold to chill even the old that have flown. But to fly up here, however, would be the biggest truancy of ones insubordinately warm self.

         See: upon this dark canvas. A stranger’s silhouette upon the bright, white, cold, one that could only have been misplaced here in the ridge between the stars and the clouds. But perhaps here is where they have not meant to be perched: Here where they can see all of mankind before them; where nothing is within reach; where every breath is a choke and stretch of the lungs to supply survival; where they are truly, utterly, irrevocably, and irreversibly alone. Alone to face the blisters of whatever onslaughts cruel Mother Nature plunges through this person, not unlike a sliver of a spike.  This is where their very core will die, their soul will mutate. This is where they die. Not physically, but inside this figure, where one cannot see. This is the most dangerous of all deaths, one full of the stench from the internal rotting, the anguished pleas-turned-screeches for it to simply end and whatever a sane person would consider to be good meticulously melts, molten, burning, destroying itself. Their own good becomes their own undoing. It is their good heart that put them up here. Almost like the good Samaritan’s plight to rescue the self-incriminating cat in the tree that results in his capture among the top branches, where the choice between taking the whole fall back down what took him so long to climb and staying stuck in those top branches still trying to find the feline that was only ever a figment becomes the decision to only see one path. And therefore the kind hearted civilian remains trapped; Unreachable and locked away from the tangible world.

         This is what your delicately creative hands have developed upon this world. Led to be guided guilefully into their own destruction of the soul. What you see in front of you? It has remained there for much longer than man has known the power to create and destroy. It has been here, laying in silence for the moment it can capture another carelessly helpful soul within it. It is a mirror. The figure atop the highest mountain your very being. This is what you could be, what you could create. It is the most tried and true form of deceptive art.

         What then was the message of the tour I have conducted you through? Look at your hands, do you see the paint that lies there, the magic that allowed you to construct this devilish form of art, one so powerful it has god like connotations in life? This is the blood of the hearts torn and ripped out from the carcass-to-be of which you have put into this mirror. Your brush is not what you took it to be, it is instead everything you took it from it. This is not what you first believed. This is what you second made. And it was not I who painted this, it was your own shaky hands. Do you really wish to know what this picture is that we have made here? This is alienation.