Time Patterns– Now at West End Gallery
Fate loves to invent patterns and designs. Its difficulty lies in complexity. But life itself is difficult because of its simplicity. It consists of a few things only, whose magnitude is not measurable by us.
–Rainer Maria Rilke, The Journal of My Other Self
The painting above, 24″ by 36″ on canvas, is titled Time Patterns. It is included in Persistent Rhythm, my annual solo exhibit at the West End Gallery that opens Friday.
I have no idea how other people look at this particular type of painting of mine, landscapes with undulating fields filled with patterns and colors. I don’t know if they like them any more or less than other the motifs employed in my works. I can never really tell what people will like or dislike in any piece. It remains a mystery to me.
But I do know that I like this painting and this type of work, both in painting them and in taking them in afterward. Painting them is a bit like juggling. It entails balancing disparate individual colors, forms, and rhythms while keeping an eye on the composition as a whole. It takes both intuition and problem-solving skills, requiring that I keep my attention intensely focused. I have found that if I get distracted or bored in doing these types of pieces, they begin to fall apart, losing any cohesiveness I might have built beforehand in them.
Time Patterns has come through the process unscathed. It does what I hoped it would do. It has a comforting warmth and the patterns in the fields of the foreground take on an abstract quality that feels both simple and complex. I see myself in the Red Tree in the character of the Questioner here, trying to decipher the patterns I detect in the world around me as I try to make sense of the world and my own place in it.
Can one ever truly make sense of this life? It seems so simple at times and so difficult at other times. Problems that seem complex often have simple solutions and situations that seem simple on the surface are unsolvable, more entangled in complexity than we can ever imagine.
So, I stand as the Red Tree looking over this landscape that I know and love, always questioning why as I wonder where the road will take us.
I have come to know that I will never know those answers.
Yet I still persist.
All I know is that this is simply my part in a pattern that may or not be part of another pattern. And that of another larger one after that.
Who knows?
Here’s a song that pretty much says it all. It’s called I Don’t Know and it is from French record producer Wax Tailor. It consists of a large number of samples taken from music and older movies set over a rhythm. I spotted Cannonball Adderley’s spoken introduction to his Mercy, Mercy, Mercy at the beginning and a DeNiro line from Casino later in. I also caught a bit of Edward G. Robinson from The Stranger. Listening is kind of looking at this painting, trying to find how the pattern fits together while still exploring at its individual segments.
Time Patterns is 24″ by 36″ on canvas and is part of my annual solo exhibit, Persistent Rhythm, now hanging at the West End Gallery in Corning, NY. The exhibit officially opens this coming Friday, July 19, with an opening reception that runs from 5-7 PM.
A Gallery Talk for this show will take place at the gallery on Saturday, August 10, from 11- noon. Stay tuned for further details.
Redtree Times 