“The Fiery Forest“– Now at the West End Gallery
I am Envy…I cannot read and therefore wish all books burned.
― Christopher Marlowe
This painting, The Fiery Forest, is a real enigma to me. I just can’t quite get a grip on what I am seeing in it, can’t decide if it is filled with positivity or is more foreboding and ominous. It attracts me greatly yet sometimes makes me a bit uneasy.
It just depends on what is on my mind at the time.
I guess anything with fire has that ambiguity. We need fire in some form. It provides warmth and allows us to cook our food and boil out the impurities in our water, just to point out the obvious positives of fire. But it also consumes our homes and forests, leaving devastation and ashes in its wake.
It’s something we need but something to be contained and controlled. We walk a tightrope with the fires that burns in and around us.
Sometimes looking at this painting, I see it as being about those things about which we are passionate. We allow ourselves to wander deeply into the fiery forest of passion as we seek to create something new from it. Yet there is always the possibility that this passion will consume us and leaves us no more than a smoldering piles of ashes.
Today, I see our covid numbers once again jumping much too high with over 100,000 new cases yesterday–over 21,000 in Florida alone– mainly perpetrated by people’s refusal to vaccinate based on a stubborn distrust of science and a denial of facts that don’t align with their beliefs or desires. That leads to one interpretation I see in this painting that comes from our willingness to burn down the forest even as we know how to control it.
I don’t want to continue on a long political rant this morning. Neither of us needs that. I’ll let the words of Christopher Marlowe at the top speak for me this morning
I don’t know. Like I said, this paintings is an enigma, like much that makes up this world, stumping me even as I enjoy looking at it.
Okay, here’s this week’s Sunday morning music. I am going with another Neil Young song, My My Hey Hey (Out of the Blue) which is the acoustic version. The thumping electric version is titled Hey Hey My My. I don’t know how well it aligns with this painting or my cluttered thoughts this morning. I latched onto out of the blue and into the black and it’s better to burn out than fade away, figuring it was close enough for me.
Redtree Times 