Oil and acrylic paintings on wood panel, 2025, Los Angeles:
From my studio in St. Paul, Minnesota:
To Feel Less Lonely
Lean out your open window, listen: the child is laughing now. No, it’s the drunk man again in the street, losing his voice, suffering each invisible star.
From A Variation on a Theme By Elizabeth Bishop by John Murillo.
What can you do to feel less lonely?
Just a tidbit of writing, by Cecilia
What can you do to feel less lonely? Take prozac or put on your cowboy boots, become a man and ride yourself across the desert, like Jesus did, like something America the band could sing about,
like that one song that you’ve been told is about heroin, but you don’t really think so. It’s so clearly about being no one, lasso’ing your solitude, taming the untameable creature,
and realizing you must soldier on namelessly. Take it all on: the heart, the riverbed, the plants, the sound. If you can’t be everything, be anything.
And might as well be nothing — the reigning champion of nothingness. What can you do to feel less lonely?
Put the white canvas up on the wall, like every grain of sand you ever saw.
Mole Habits
He wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld. […] They would meet quietly as if they had known each other and had made their tryst, perhaps at one of the gates or in some more secret place. They would be alone, surrounded by darkness and silence: and in that moment of supreme tenderness he would be transfigured. He would fade into something impalpable under her eyes and then in a moment he would be transfigured. Weakness and timidity and inexperience would fall from him in that magic moment
From A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
James Joyce, 1916.
No Artist Statement, Just Digging
Another Tidbit, by Cecilia
Within me are trite little things worth being bored about. I went walking in the woods today without music. It doesn’t seem like much but I’m doing the the things I’m supposed to. Carving a little path through the trees. There are no finished paintings and there are no final drafts to place on the editor’s cherry wood desk in a satisfying THWUNK of white papers pinched by a black binder clip. And I can’t name ideas but I have to think they’re quietly forming inside of me. Doing work like a mole moving earth.
If you were to walk over his very spot, you wouldn’t even know he’s tunneling, but he is, under the garden, blind. I want to move like the mole does. He only acts on instinct. There’s no prime directive. No artist statement. Just digging. He’s got the muse, in a way. And someday there’ll be a whole tangle of tunnels he’s made. Whole time, he’s just swimming through the earth. Unthinking.
You think about how long it must’ve taken to create the catacombs. That swirling, tangled vortex of human remains. People aren’t made for shoveling, not like that.
Aren’t we so beautiful underneath, our articulate skeletons. You look at a finished thing like a skull and wonder how we were made. Gorgeous. Cracked on purpose.
I know better than to think God had first drafts. It was perfect at first, and all incremental from there. Or maybe the word is iterative. Whatever happened, it happened in a mysterious way.
Until one day, a mole emerged with his funny shovel hands. And one day The Louvre opened their doors. And maybe one day I’ll write a story. One I’d actually like to show you.