Monde Parfait— At West End Gallery
It is a pity indeed to travel and not get this essential sense of landscape values. You do not need a sixth sense for it. It is there if you just close your eyes and breathe softly through your nose; you will hear the whispered message, for all landscapes ask the same question in the same whisper. ‘I am watching you — are you watching yourself in me?’ Most travelers hurry too much…the great thing is to try and travel with the eyes of the spirit wide open, and not to much factual information. To tune in, without reverence, idly — but with real inward attention. It is to be had for the feeling…you can extract the essence of a place once you know how. If you just get as still as a needle, you’ll be there.
― Lawrence Durrell, Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel
I have used a portion of the above passage from Lawrence Durrell here before. But witnessing from afar the devastation of Lahaina from the Hawaiian wildfires, made me think about it again this morning. It was on that island and in that place that I first recognized that I was looking for something intangible in my life, something that couldn’t be quantified or easily demonstrated.
Home. A sense of place and belonging. Where you feel embraced in the landscape and it takes on an almost human quality, becoming a fleshed-out character in your story.
I felt this first there on that island. It was much like Durrell describes. Well beyond experiencing the normal touristy things, being an early riser in a place many time zones behind my own, I was often up at 3:30 or 4 AM and out exploring the island in the early morning hours. I would drive for hours, sometimes circling the entire northern part of the island along the remote coastal road. I was usually the only car on the road and could take my time, watching the first light break on the ocean and against the rough coast and the west Maui mountains.
It was unhurried, silent, and reverent watching. Eyes and mind open. It was an intimate conversation with that place, one that left me feeling as though I understood the spirit of that place. And with that came a sense of belonging. Of home.
We had planned to move there for a number of years after that, but things in one’s life happen and it never came about. But those embracing conversations with an entity of place resonated forever with me. I think that’s why the landscape is and will remain the preferred subject of my work.
I paint landscapes and they are, to be sure, travels of the spirit and conversations with place, one where the painted landscape asks the viewer, as Durrell wrote: I am watching you — are you watching yourself in me?
Redtree Times 