Klyde Warren Park, Dallas, Texas
She sits in the park on a red blanket with a bottle filled with blue drink. She watches her dog, her child, her husband, while she doesn’t move herself – except her eyes. Lasering back and forth across the grassy patch they stay on target. Meanwhile, the world moves on, unknown.
Texas Sculpture Garden
Frisco, Texas
And I said, I don’t care if they lay me off either, because I told, I told Bill that if they move my desk one more time, then, then I’m, I’m quitting, I’m going to quit. And, and I told Don too, because they’ve moved my desk four times already this year, and I used to be over by the window, and I could see the squirrels, and they were married, but then, they switched from the Swingline to the Boston stapler, but I kept my Swingline stapler because it didn’t bind up as much, and I kept the staples for the Swingline stapler and it’s not okay because if they take my stapler then I’ll set the building on fire…
—- Milton, Office Space
Staples
Paul Kittelson, Houston
2001 Stainless Steel
Staples, Paul Kittelson
“Why do people have to be this lonely? What’s the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?”
― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart
Staples, Paul Kittelson
“The gods are strange. It is not our vices only they make instruments to scourge us. They bring us to ruin through what in us is good, gentle, humane, loving.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis
Staples, Paul Kittelson, photograph manipulated in Corel Painter
“Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I’m not going to make it, but you laugh inside — remembering all the times you’ve felt that way.”
― Charles Bukowski
“There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.”
― Alain de Botton
Texas Sculpture Garden,
Frisco, Texas
Andrew Rogers
Australian
Balance
1997
“Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.”
― Anaïs Nin
Balance, Andrew Rogers
“You are a beautiful person, Doctor. Clearheaded. Strong. But you seem always to be dragging your heart along the ground. From now on, little by little, you must prepare yourself to face death. If you devote all of your future energy to living, you will not be able to die well. You must begin to shift gears, a little at a time. Living and dying are, in a sense, of equal value.”–Nimit in “Thailand”
― Haruki Murakami, after the quake
“The fact is that nothing is more difficult to believe than the truth; conversely, nothing seduces like the power of lies, the greater the better. It’s only natural, and you will have to find the right balance. Having said that, let me add that this particular old woman hasn’t been collecting only years; she has also collected stories, and none sadder or more terrible than the one she’s about to tell you. You have been at the heart of this story without knowing it until today …”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Midnight Palace
“It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas. Obviously those two modes of thought are in some tension. But if you are able to exercise only one of these modes, whichever one it is, you’re in deep trouble.
If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you. You never learn anything new. You become a crotchety old person convinced that nonsense is ruling the world. (There is, of course, much data to support you.) But every now and then, maybe once in a hundred cases, a new idea turns out to be on the mark, valid and wonderful. If you are too much in the habit of being skeptical about everything, you are going to miss or resent it, and either way you will be standing in the way of understanding and progress.
On the other hand, if you are open to the point of gullibility and have not an ounce of skeptical sense in you, then you cannot distinguish the useful as from the worthless ones.”
― Carl Sagan
“The great systems that inform the world about the truth and life invariably claim to be absolutely truthful and well-balanced. In reality they are quaking bridges built out of yearning.”
― Peter Høeg, Tales of the Night
Texas Sculpture Garden,
Frisco, Texas
James Surls
American (Colorado/Texas)
Again in the Meadows
2002
“There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face”
― William Shakespeare
Photographs manipulated with Corel Painter and The Gimp.
James Surls, Again in the Meadows
“I believe that the justification of art is the internal combustion it ignites in the hearts of men and not its shallow, externalized, public manifestations. The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.”
― Glenn Gould
James Surls, Again in the Meadows, plus a construction crane, a pile of dirt, and a stop sign
The whole difference between a construction and a creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.
—- G. K. Chesterton
Digital Painting done with Corel Painter and The Gimp, based on a photograph taken in the reflecting pool in front of the Winspear Opera House, Dallas, Texas
“Used to say there was four women in every man’s heart. The Maid in the
Meadow, the Demon Lover, the Stouthearted Woman, the Tall and Quiet Woman.”
― Annie Proulx, The Shipping News
Four Women, Winspear Opera House, Dallas, Texas
Texas Sculpture Garden,
Frisco, Texas
Gunner Theel American (New York)
Right Angles (#23)
Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents’ beds, unerringly I rush! Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to the iron way!
—-Melville, Moby Dick
So, so you think you can tell Heaven from Hell,
blue skies from pain.
Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail?
A smile from a veil?
Do you think you can tell?
—-Pink Floyd, Wish You Were Here
We must beat the iron while it is hot, but we may polish it at leisure.
—-John Dryden
Texas Sculpture Garden,
Frisco, Texas
Eliseo Garcia, Farmers Branch
Maternal Caress
1999 Cordova Limestone
“Touch. It is touch that is the deadliest enemy of chastity, loyalty, monogamy, gentility with its codes and conventions and restraints. By touch we are betrayed and betray others … an accidental brushing of shoulders or touching of hands … hands laid on shoulders in a gesture of comfort that lies like a thief, that takes, not gives, that wants, not offers, that awakes, not pacifies. When one flesh is waiting, there is electricity in the merest contact.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose
Texas Sculpture Garden,
Frisco, Texas
Zad Roumaya, Dallas
Time Management
2004 Aluminun, Paint
In Memory of Jody Young 1978-2004
Time Management, Zad Roumaya, feet hanging over the edge
“Life was not to be sitting in hot amorphic leisure in my backyard idly writing or not-writing, as the spirit moved me. It was, instead, running madly, in a crowded schedule, in a squirrel cage of busy people. Working, living, dancing, dreaming, talking, kissing — singing, laughing, learning. The responsibility, the awful responsibility of managing (profitably) 12 hours a day for 10 weeks is rather overwhelming when there is nothing, noone, to insert an exact routine into the large unfenced acres of time — which it is so easy to let drift by in soporific idling and luxurious relaxing. It is like lifting a bell jar off a securely clockwork-like functioning community, and seeing all the little busy people stop, gasp, blow up and float in the inrush, (or rather outrush,) of the rarified scheduled atmosphere — poor little frightened people, flailing impotent arms in the aimless air. That’s what it feels like: getting shed of a routine. Even though one had rebelled terribly against it, even then, one feels uncomfortable when jounced out of the repetitive rut. And so with me. What to do? Where to turn? What ties, what roots? as I hang suspended in the strange thin air of back-home?”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Time Management, Zad Roumaya, feet
“Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report written on birds that he’d had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books about birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
Time Management, Zad Roumaya, Briefcase
Bill Chance 