I never climbed any ladder: I have achieved eminence by sheer gravitation.
—George Bernard Shaw, preface to The Irrational Knot (1905)
Shaw wrote his novel, The Irrational Knot, in 1880 and wrote a preface for it in a new American edition 25 years later. It’s a comic introduction but has many interesting lines including one near the beginning in which he says that the book was written by someone other than himself as he was now, in 1905.
As Shaw explains:
At present, of course, I am not the author of The Irrational Knot.
Physiologists inform us that the substance of our bodies (and consequently of our souls) is shed and renewed at such a rate that no part of us lasts longer than eight years: I am therefore not now in any atom of me the person who wrote The Irrational Knot in 1880. The last of that author perished in 1888; and two of his successors have since joined the majority.
This made me think about my upcoming solo show at the Principle Gallery in June. This year’s show is my 25th solo exhibit at the Alexandria gallery which makes me wonder if those paintings from that first show in 2000 were painted by the same person who is feverishly working on these new ones scattered around my studio.
They certainly look different in many ways. The techniques and the media employed have certainly changed and evolved. The surfaces are different with more textures and layers and even deeper colors. More elements have been added to the compositions.
Maybe there is not a single atom remaining from the previous me who painted those earlier paintings.
However, though every atom might be gone from that progenitor in 2000, the subsequent generations of myself possess the same DNA. The emotions rendered are much the same. The Red Tree remains, like some genetic physical trait that spans multiple generations in a family– always the same but slightly different in its time. And though there are more layers and elements now, the basic compositions remain simplified.
I think of this when I look at this new painting, In Eminence, from the upcoming show. It is a painting that would have looked much the same in some ways when the me of 2000 (or the great-great grandfather me if you go with Shaw’s premise that we are new beings every 8 years) might have painted it.
You would recognize the family resemblance, but it would also look very different. This piece feels to me as though it took the lessons passed down from one ancestral me to the next and incorporated them into a statement that fully describes the state of being that exists now in the Red Tree family line. It’s a piece that brings me great satisfaction in viewing it.
Let’s call it family pride. I think the me that was in 2000 would be happy with it.
But we’ll never really know, will we? That dude is long gone.
But hopefully, the me that might one day be my grandson, if my time here on this spinning rock allows that to occur, will feel the same.
I have a feeling he will feel much the same about it as his old granddad did back in the day.
Just a hunch on my part but who knows what he will really think about it?
Crazy kids…
In Eminence is 30 inches high by 15 inches wide on canvas. It is included in my solo exhibit, Continuum: The RedTree at 25, which opens June 14, 2024 at the Principle Gallery in Alexandria, VA.
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