…Finishing the hat,
How you have to finish the hat.
How you watch the rest of the world
From a window
While you finish the hat.
Mapping out a sky.
What you feel like, planning a sky.
What you feel when voices that come
Through the window
Go
Until they distance and die,
Until there’s nothing but sky
And how you’re always turning back too late
From the grass or the stick
Or the dog or the light,
How the kind of woman willing to wait’s
Not the kind that you want to find waiting
To return you to the night,
Dizzy from the height,
Coming from the hat,
Studying the hat,
Entering the world of the hat,
Reaching through the world of the hat
Like a window,
Back to this one from that.
Studying a face,
Stepping back to look at a face
Leaves a little space in the way like a window,
But to see-
It’s the only way to see.
And when the woman that you wanted goes,
You can say to yourself, “Well, I give what I give.”
But the woman who won’t wait for you knows
That, however you live,
There’s a part of you always standing by,
Mapping out the sky,
Finishing a hat…
Starting on a hat..
Finishing a hat…
Look, I made a hat…
Where there never was a hat
Finishing The Hat, from Sunday in the Park With George by Stephen Sondheim
Years ago, a guy I was sweet on and pestering with endless e-mails sent me these lines; they’re the lyrics of the song Finishing The Hat, from Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday In The Park With George, a fanciful musical about the pointillist painter George Seurat. What my object of desire was trying to tell me, I think, was to stop distracting him so that he could get on with his work and “finish the hat”.
14 years later, here I am, singing that song (it’s got a beautiful, dreamy swelling of melody, and the words are pensive…this strikes me as a very personal song by Sondheim) and trying to finish a hat (or eight) of my own; with just four weeks to opening night, I have been painting 12, sometimes 14 hours a day. I only leave the boat when there’s nothing at all left to eat (and I do mean nothing…last Saturday I actually shared a can of cat food—it was just tuna, I checked the label—with Dude! It was fine. Needed salt.)
And it’s all hats, man…little things in the paintings: fingernails, the spine of a book, a teacup, a plum-colored shadow on the inside of a girl’s thigh…no big, grand gestures, no arm’s sweep of vivid color, but a million little details that may not seem important, and yet my paintings are made up of those details, and there is no moving forward until everything has been given it’s share of time, work, and concentration.
I don’t think I’ll be blogging very often, or about anything very interesting, until the show’s out of the way. Bear with me.
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The weather is conspiring against me these days, and I have been suffering from serious internet withdrawals! Heavy clouds and plenty of rain are starving my solar panels and preventing me from carrying my laptop ashore regularly to charge it. Sorry for the long silence. Will do my best to get my gadgets ashore tomorrow and write a few posts.
