The De Young museum is opening up in San Francisco.  I feel such hope when I’m in a museum and then walk outside to see what we endeavor to capture in a frame or form. The museum is presenting a conversation between Alexander Calder and Pablo Picasso.  I’ve always related to Calder, especially his mobiles.  

Alexander Calder wrote: “The Universe is real, but you can’t see it.  You have to imagine it.”  

In 1951, Calder observed: “At that time and practically ever since, the underlying form in my work has been the systems of the Universe, or part thereof. What I mean is that the idea of detached bodies floating in space, of different sizes and densities, perhaps of different colors and temperatures, and surrounded and interlarded with wisps of gaseous condition, and some at rest, while others move in peculiar manners, seems to me the ideal source of form.”

Picasso in Life with Picasso wrote: “If one occupies oneself with what is full, that is, the object as positive form, the space around it is reduced to almost nothing. If one occupies oneself primarily with the space that surrounds the object, the object is reduced to almost nothing. What interests us most – what is outside or what is inside a form?“

I sit here now, a perceived form, feeling size and shape, texture and vibration, moving in and out celebrating the changing fields I influence and am influenced by.  I swing and am swung, interacting fields of exchange.  Gratitude ribbons the chains.

John Muir – “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”