This is a new painting that is on its way to California for my show, The Waking Moment,which opens December 1 at the the Just Looking Gallery in San Luis Obispo. This 30″ by 40″ canvas has really stood out for me in the studio, catching my eye constantly. There is just something essential in this piece for me, an indefinable sense of being, as though there is some inner connection with a greater power. Perhaps that is why I call this painting Brahman.
Brahman is a Hindu term that describes the ultimate goal as well as the Absolute. It is not really what one might call God in the sense of Western religions. Brahman is that which makes up the nature of everything, as the Upanishad states: Brahman is of the nature of truth, knowledge and infinity. It is both the cause and effect of all reality.
It truly is a hard thing to describe, given its scope in all things, in a short post by someone like me, one who is certainly unequipped to define such a power. But there is something in this piece that, for me, has that nature of truth, knowledge and infinity. It both humbles me and lifts me yet brings a sense calm over me, as though I am seeing one that has an understanding and acceptance of this universal power.
This piece will give me pause for some time to come…
I was going to write about last week’s election here, about the runup to the election and the aftermath, particularly the awful spinning by Karl Rove and his ilk who try to justify their deceitful tactics and the ridiculous expense of these campaigns (from which they profit very nicely) with a continuance of their takers versus makers argument, one that drives me mad. But I’m too fatigued by the whole thing. So I set out to seek something that might catch my eye and, as I often do, headed over to Luminous Lint where I came across this striking image, a blaze of color and shape that filled the frame like a Pop Art vision. Indeed, in the thumbnail as it was shown I thought that it was a painting.
It wasn’t until I clicked on it to see the larger image that I realized that this was actually a person in costume. Titled Junkanoo #1, it was an image taken by photographer Edward Yanowitz around 1979 in the Bahamas. This image was actually used as a postage stamp for the Bahamas in 1979. Junkanoos are street parades, much like a Mummers-type event, that are common in the Bahamas and about which Yanowitz wrote when describing this image:
“It takes place once a year on two nights, Boxing day (26 Dec.) and New Years morning. It starts at 3 or 4 in the morning until about 8am. Groups called “gangs” compete against each other for the best costume designs and rhythm sounds, there are hundreds of people dancing around, playing on goat skin drums, beating cow bells together, whistles and various instruments. It’s a very powerful sound. When I photographed it during the seventies there were very few street lights so it was in complete darkness. I had to wait for the slides to come back just to see if I got anything, and if you discovered something in your work, you had to wait another year before you could utilize it the next time.”
I immediately thought Pop Art at first but the more I looked at this the more I realized that this really reminded me of some pieces by one of my favorite Modernist painters, Marsden Hartley. His Portrait from around 1914 is shown here. He did several of these colorful pieces with strong shapes and lines that are juxtaposed on dark backgrounds. As I was searching for my own voice, these pieces were deeply influential. The darkness underneath both gave the color a boost and created a different subtext for how the viewer might take in these colors, not simply as being bright and joyous. This was one of the things I wanted so much in my own work.
Maybe that’s why this image of the Junkanoo parader stopped me in my tracks. I don’t know for sure. But it is definitely a great image.
Painting is a blind man’s profession. He paints not what he sees, but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen.
–Pablo Picasso
********************
I love this quote. I think that is what all art really is– an expression of feeling. Emotion. I know my best work, or at least the work that I feel is most directly connected to who I truly am as a human being, is always focused on expressing emotion rather than depicting any one place or person or thing. At its best, the piece as a whole becomes a vehicle for expression and the subject is merely a focal point in this expression. The subject matter becomes irrelevant beyond that. It could be a the most innocuous object, a chair or a tree in my case. It doesn’t really matter because the painting’s emotion is carried by the painting as a whole- the colors, the texture, the linework, the brushstrokes, etc.
In other words, it’s not what you see but what you feel.
I think many of Vincent Van Gogh‘s works are amazing example of this. They are so filled with emotion that you often don’t even realize how mundane the subject matter really is until you step back to analyze it for a moment. I’ve described here before what an incredible feeling it was to see one of his paintings for the first time, how it seemed to vibrate with feeling, seeming almost alive on the wall. It was a vase of irises. A few flowers in a pot. How many hundreds of thousands of such paintings have been created just like that? But Van Gogh resonates not because of the subject matter, not because of precise depiction of the flowers or the vase. No, it was a deep expression of his emotion, his wonder at the world he inhabited, inside and out.
I also see this in a lot of music. It’s not the subject but the way the song is expressed. How many times have we heard overwrought , schmaltzy ballads that try to create overt emotion and never seem to pull it off? Then you hear someone interpret a simple song with deep and direct emotion and the song soars powerfully. I often use Johnny Cash‘s last recordings, in the last years and months before his death, as evidence of this. Many were his interpretations of well known songs and his voice had, by that time, lost much of the power of his earlier days. But the emotion, the wonder, in his delivery was palpable. Moving.
Likewise, here’s Chet Baker from just a few months before his death. He, too, had lost the power and grace of youth due to a life scarred by the hardship of drug abuse and violence. But the expression is raw and real. It makes this interpretation of Little Girl Blue stand out for me.
Normally at this time of the year I am in a winding down sort of mode, easing back from my easel and painting table to take a deep breath. It is normally when I reassess the year and begin to put together a new direction in which I might push the work. But this has been an unusual year and I find myself busier than ever. My show, Inward Bound, at the Kada Gallery runs until December 6 and my exhibition at the Fenimore Art Museum, Internal Landscapes, hangs until December 31. That would be a full schedule in itself but this year offers yet another opportunity, one that fills my schedule to the brink and has kept me fully engaged in the studio as of late. I am talking about a solo show of my work, The Waking Moment, that will be opening December 1 at the Just Looking Galleryin San Luis Obispo in California.
Owner Ralph Gorton and Gallery Director Ken McGavin first contacted me earlier this year and began showing my work at the gallery, which opened in 1984, in April. They have done a fabulous job highlighting my work and it has done very well in their gallery, to the point where we agreed that a show was in order.
I wasn’t sure about it at first. I was fairly new to their market and I was also thinking that I wouldn’t be able to build a show for them. But they have introduced me thoroughly to their clients and the pace of this year in the studio has had me immersed in a deep groove which made it possible for me to work at a high level without much of a period of buildup. As a result, I find myself pretty excited about the work I am producing at this time , which includes the piece shown above, The Prospering Light, a 16″ by 26″ painting on paper.
I am nearly finished with the last few pieces for the show which will soon be on their way to the California coast. Then I will step back for a moment or two. At least, I think I will. This rhythm I have in the studio at this time feels so right that I am a little hesitant to step away for more than a moment, knowing how difficult it can be to recapture that feeling. But for now, I am riding this wave in the studio and am excited by each new rush that comes in the work. I will be showing more of this new work in the coming weeks as the Just Looking Gallery show approaches.
I had a good time yesterday at a Food For Thought lecture at the Fenimore Art Museum where I was the speaker. We first had a lovely luncheon in the museum’s Study Center, surrounded by cabinets full of artifacts from the fabulous Thaw Collection of American Indian Art, one of the prized collections of the museum and arguably the finest collection of Native American art in the world. I spoke briefly after the luncheon in the Study Center, filling in some biographical details, before we moved the talk up to the gallery containing the show, where I continued the talk and fielded questions.
All in all, it went pretty well. The attendees were wonderful and attentive, making me feel very welcome, and their questions and comments were insightful. As always in the aftermath, I felt that I had omitted crucial details. But I have come to the understanding that if I were to try to tell all the anecdotes and pass on all of the information about my work that I’ve amassed over the years that these talks would never end. I know that I wouldn’t like that and I can’t imagine anyone else who would. That being said, I thought that yesterday’s talk went just about right and I left feeling that most everyone found something enjoyable or informative in some part of the talk. I sure hope so.
I have to extend some huge thanks here to a group of folks who made extraordinary efforts to come to the talk and to who I don’t think I can ever fully express my gratitude. They all were owners of my paintings who had one ( or two, in one case) that were part of the show and had accepted my invitation to attend the event so that they might see their paintings in the lovely setting that the Fenimore affords. All came from considerable distances and took valuable time from their lives to make the journey. I would like to deeply thank Gary Tanigawa who traveled up from the Alexandria, VA area, Dominique and Vince Haibach from Erie, PA and Loni Kula and her friend Mary Helen Olmstead from the Corning area. I am humbled and moved by your willingness to participate yesterday and can’t say “Thank You” enough. I can only hope that you found it worth the effort.
I must also thank photographer Moira Law and friend ( whose name evades me this morning– I am so sorry!) who traveled down from Ottawa for the talk. We have corresponded briefly over the last few years and it was wonderful to finally meet her and to talk for a bit. Thank you so much for taking the time, Moira, and thanks to everyone who made time to attend yesterday. It was most appreciated.
And finally, thank you to Paul D’Ambrosio and the great staff at the Fenimore Art Museum– Michelle Murdock, Maria Vann, Sue deBruijn and Kajsa Sabatke, among others– for the wonderful experience. They are true pros and have made this whole thing feel very special for me, something I will always remember with great warmth. Thank you so much allowing me the chance to experience this.
Well, today is Election Day. Finally. The campaign has seemed like it has lasted forever but it will all soon be over and hopefully there will be a clear winner without any stench from the ongoing controversies over voter suppression and voter fraud, particularly in, but not limited to, the states of Ohio and Pennsylvania. We all assume that in our democracy every vote counts and that our right to cast that vote is an inalienable right. But in these two states there are things happening that put both those assumptions to the test.
From Florida we see image after image of long lines of voters who are forced to wait sometimes up to 8 or 9 hours in order to cast their ballots, conditions which even Republican Christine Todd Whitman says are akin to those one might see in an election in a Third World country. You might notice that many of these lines are in areas heavily populated by minorities. Denied the ability by the courts to require more extensive ID from voters to fight the straw man of voter fraud they throw out as their reason, suppression has evolved into putting the determination of the voter to the test : How much will you tolerate in order to vote?
This is also happening in Ohio’s urban minority areas as well. But there is a more insidious shadow hanging over Ohio in the potential for fraud in the vote count. As documented yesterday in an article on the Salon.com site, there were software patches recently installed on the electronic voting machines in 39 Ohio counties that circumvented the certification process of the agency that oversees voting procedures in Ohio. It is basically uncertified and untested (by third parties) tabulation software. The possibilities for vote fraud are enormous.
Around the country in recent years, republican legislators have been crowing for more and more Voter ID laws to combat a problem that has not been in evidence for years. Outside of suppressing groups of voters that they see as not being in their camp, I have always wondered why they were putting so much attention on this archaic form of voter fraud when the obvious way to corrupt the process is to let everyone vote and simply subvert the results. It’s so much more effective than depending on people showing up at polling places to vote multiple times, like a scene out of the precincts of Chicago in the 1930’s. Too slow and too many opportunites for something to go wrong or to be detected. There are fewer conspirators to betray the plan if you can simply switch a vote for A to a vote for B, especially if the software does it seamlessly. Everybody votes and everybody leaves the polls feeling that their rights are in order and that their vote has been counted. And though the exit polls might show that there is a discrepancy in the results that are announced , they can simply be shrugged off as flawed polling, something we hear everyday in the campaign.
Perhaps the Voter ID controversy is in itself a ruse, a diversion from the bigger scam. I hope I’m wrong here and that this is simply some crazy conspiracy theory. But in a race where over two billion dollars have been spent to obtain power, the stakes are indeed high enough to not rule out any possibility. I hope that the authorities are taking this seriously and that if this subversion of our system is taking place that the perpetrators are handled severely. We deserve to vote and have it honestly counted. Otherwise , our whole system falls apart.
So, lets assume that the system is still pure and get out there and do the responsible thing: Vote.
Republicans have been accused of abandoning the poor. It’s the other way around. They never vote for us.
–Dan Quayle
*************
I don’t know why I used the quote above from Dan Quayle except that it made me laugh when I stumbled across it. This has been a particularly long and tough political season and Quayle’s clueless words made me step back from it a bit. Though I consider myself an independent, I am definitely liberal in my political leanings and always have been . There have been points in my life, especially now in the time of the ideologues, when liberalism has been portrayed as some sort of anarchistic/atheistic/communist movement with the word liberal being thrown about as an insult. That bothers me because I have always been proud of the accomplishments of those people who came before me who carried the banner of progressive thought with honor.
They were extraordinarily brave people who spoke out against the outrages of the day that stood in direct contradiction to the liberal belief in equality and liberty for all. They were the abolitionists of the 1800’s fighting the heavily moneyed institution of slavery. They were the suffragettes who fought so that women might have voting equality and the union organizers of the early 1900’s who fought for safer working conditions and fair pay and against child labor. They were the people who stood against the Fascists in Europe in the 1930’s and 1940’s. They were the ones who marched and died so that civil rights were for everyone.
They were the people who sought to clean the stains of these inequalities from our flag and in every case they came up against conservative opposition. There was always a group who tried to maintain the status quo, to protect against what they felt was an attack on their America, even though their America was one based on injustice and inequality. Can you imagine an America without these ideals that Liberalism has championed, a world where the conservative thought of the day had somehow persevered ? Sure, it’s easy to say that slavery would have ended or that women would have received the vote anyhow on their own but there was no guarantee. Just the fact that it took until the 1960’s that a hard won Civil Rights Act was enacted is proof of that.
Think how your own life might be different without liberal thought and action. I can guarantee you that it would not be a better life or a better world.
While trying to find something to divert my attention away from the last few anxiety-filled days of the current political campaign (there’s a lot I would like to say about this but I have pledged to keep my politics out of this– for now), I turned to one of my favorites sites, Luminous Lint, once more. It has a treasure trove of incredible photography of all sorts and I always quickly find something there that captures my imagination. One of my favorite things there is to see images of people from from the earliest days of photography, the 1840’s and 1850’s, just to study them a bit, to see how these people who lived in a time so unlike the time in which we currently dwell might be similar to us. It puts a face on history for me, much more so than formal or even folk portraiture.
The photo above on the right is good example of this. Found in a section that was a collection of early occupational daguerreotypes (click here to see the whole group) that depicted people of the time with the tools and dress of their trade, it is an image of a General Thomas Jesupfrom around 1847. Shown with his sabre and the uniform and hat of his rank, the photo tells me so much more than this official portrait shown here on the left. He is so much more rounded as a human. His eyeglasses and the his gaze toward the camera give him a more shrewd and studious look making me think that while he was a man of action, he was also a thinker, a planner. And indeed he was. He was the Quartermaster General for 42 years until his death in 1860 at the age of 72, making arrangements for the acquisition and delivery of supplies to our troops over the quickly expanding nation.
There’s something extraordinary for me in looking at a photo like this and seeing the actual face of someone who fought in the War of 1812 and was a contemporary of someone like the legendary Andrew Jackson. I feel so much more connected to history in being able to see his actual demeanor before the camera. It really does take my mind from the present time, letting me live for moments in that bit of history rather than in the history we are currently making. And sometimes that little journey back in time is a relief…
There is a very good review in today’s Erie Times-News of my Kada Gallery show, Inward Bound,written by Karen Rene Merkle who has reviewed my Erie shows in the past. Reviews of any kind have become more and more scarce over the years as the influence of the newspaper has waned in most markets, especially in those the size of Erie, so I am always interested in seeing what an unbiased observer might see in my work. As an artist, you set up a defense mechanism of sorts by trying not to put too much emphasis on what someone might say or write about your work. But in the end, your human nature wins out and you react accordingly. When someone knocks your work, even in respectful terms, it still bothers you. Conversely, when someone praises your work you are happily satisfied. This is, as I said, a very good review so I am happily satisfied. I have written here that I felt that this show was a very strong group of work and it is gratifying that someone such as Ms. Merkle takes the time and effort to take a long and insightful look at it.
Thanks so much for the kind words, Karen. It is most appreciated.
This is a new painting that is on its way to California for my show, The Waking Moment,which opens December 1 at the the Just Looking Gallery in San Luis Obispo. This 30″ by 40″ canvas has really stood out for me in the studio, catching my eye constantly. There is just something essential in this piece for me, an indefinable sense of being, as though there is some inner connection with a greater power. Perhaps that is why I call this painting Brahman.
Redtree Times 