I said that the world is absurd, but I was too hasty. This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart.
–Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus: And Other Essays
The new painting shown here is titled Echoes of Time and is 40″ tall by 20″ wide on canvas. It is included in Continuum: The RedTree at 25, my annual solo exhibit at the Principle Gallery which opens in June.
In recent years in my work, I have occasionally employed a sky comprised of a series of continually expanding concentric rings moving out from the sun/moon.
I don’t know what I would call it. I don’t really call it anything. It just is what it is, without a label. Maybe a spiral sky? Or perhaps an echo sky since that describing a reverberation from the past is what immediately comes to mind whenever I finally examine and try to interpret one of these pieces after they are completed.
But what is it an echo of? Is it a message from the past? If so, is it a warning of what is to come, something that has taken place once and seems ready to occur once more? Or is it something more encouraging, that humanity has endured the past and will continue to echo forward in time?
I surely don’t know. Maybe every echo has its own personal message, one that can only be recognized by only a few who are continually looking and listening for such things. Searchers, I guess you would call them though I don’t know that they even know what thing it they seek.
I often write of seeking something in my art so maybe I am looking for something from the past, my own and that of all mankind, that makes this world make sense. Maybe it that longing for clarity in an irrational world of like that in the passage above from Albert Camus?
That sounds right to me. Though I live and work in the gray areas of life, I do appreciate clarity.
But then again, maybe this sky of echoes is simply saying what goes around, comes around.
And there is a sense of clarity in that.
Here’s song that is titled Echo from the British folk trio Talisk. It has a building intensity that feels like an expanding echo. Good stuff.
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