Strange confluences.
I was going through some old work and came across this piece just as a random track came up on my iPod. It was a Levon Helm song, the sort of title track from his latest CD, Dirt Farmer.
It really went together beautifully and the rhythm of Levon’s music kind of captured how I saw this fellow looking at his land, the beauty and sorrow of it.
I may have displayed this piece before. It’s called Let Us Now Praise Famous Men… and was part of my first solo exhibit some 13 years ago, a show called Exiles that was hung at a lovely art center, the Gmeiner, in Wellsboro, PA. This piece has always resonated with me, having sorts of indicators that I only see. Little cues that remind me of the time in which this piece was done, giving me a sense of how I felt at the time and how I was viewing the world. Things that only make the piece special for me.
That’s a pretty common thing. Cheri has a piece of mine in our home that I painter several years back. A nice piece but not a great one. But when I see it I remember all that went into this particular piece and the struggle to pull something from what appeared to be a mess at the time. I see the effort and determination that recovered the painting from the scrap heap and made it work. I see it as a turning point in my confidence in my own abilities.
But those are only for my eyes, probably not evident to the outside world. Kind of like the dirt farmer above. Who knows what his eyes behold?
Here’s Poor Old Dirt Farmer from Levon Helm:
Redtree Times 