Something Beyond– Coming to Principle Gallery, June 2024
“Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of–something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat’s side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it–tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest–if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself–you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say ‘Here at last is the thing I was made for.’ We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the things we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
I didn’t know how to fully describe what I was seeing in this new painting until I came across the passage above from C.S. Lewis a few weeks ago. That one phrase in it– the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want— very much sums it up for me.
It is the thing that drives the search and fuels both our hopes and doubts. The thing that has us forever scanning the far horizon and continuously listening for that eternal echo that does not die, that stays forever in our ears and mind. That thing that pulls us along with momentary hints hidden in certain aromas, tastes, movements or shapes or shades of color.
To catch a mere glimpse or hear a lingering tone of its echo is enough to propel an unending search, knowing that it is that thing that is always just beyond the next hill.
And the one past that.
It is much like the two-line from Walt Whitman, The Untold Want:
The untold want, by life and land ne’er granted,
Now, Voyager, sail thou forth, to seek and find.
I don’t know that it’s something that can be fully explained in a few paragraphs. It is, after all, the secret signature of each of our souls alone. Only you will know if to speaks to you.
That being said, this painting, Something Beyond, was one of the first paintings completed for this show and it set the tone for me, as far as its intensity of color and feel. It is 30 inches by 20 inches on canvas and is included in my upcoming solo exhibit, Continuum: The Red Tree at 25, at the Principle Gallery, which opens June 14.
Redtree Times 