Exiles: The Lost One 2011
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
––H. P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu (1926)
Today’s triad was a tough one. I thought the painting at the top and the passage from the H.P. Lovecraft story of horror paired up well. The painting could easily be seen as portraying someone faced with the sudden realization of their position in a terrifying reality, deciding whether to accept madness or to flee into the waiting arms of a new dark age.
Okay, that sounds pretty bad, doesn’t it? Maybe that’s overstating the case for that poor fellow in the painting. Maybe I shouldn’t put such a burden on him.
He’s quite an enigma to me, as it is. He (his title is The Lost One, by the way) was painted back in 2011 as a quick attempt at recapturing the look and feel of the Exiles series from the mid-1990’s. I never perceived him as having the same depth of emotion and sort of thought of him as a lesser member of the Exiles family.
But over the years, he has grown on me. Every time I pull him out, he seems to have deepened a bit and gained some different aspect that I hadn’t noticed before. Maybe it is just the result of familiarity.
I don’t know. But he seems to have more of a story to share with me as time passes. Maybe he has evolved or maybe it’s me. Or maybe instead of using evolve I should use devolve?
Who knows?
To finish up this triad I am playing a song from Sister Gertrude Morgan called I Got the New World in My View. That could certainly apply to The Lost One and to the Lovecraft passage though I doubt Sister Gertrude would see it that way. The late Sister Gertrude Morgan (1900-1980) was a lot of things– a street poet. preacher, musician, and visual artist– who was born in Alabama lived the last half of her life in New Orleans. Her influence on the artists and musicians of New Orleans is immense and she gained wider recognition in her later life and in the recent years.
This song is from a 1970 album, Let’s Make a Record, which featured simply her voice accompanied by her tambourine. It’s pretty remarkable stuff. An example of her artwork is shown with the link below. I will attempt to share more in the future.
Redtree Times 